


Awaking One Morning from Uneasy Dreams

by SylvanWitch



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M, Memory Alteration, Mental Institutions, Not Canon Compliant, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 04:36:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1155142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint Barton discovers himself confined to a secure mental health facility, but it's Phil Coulson who thinks he's losing his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Awaking One Morning from Uneasy Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> This story goes AU for _The Avengers_ after Clint is knocked unconscious by Natasha. Events of Season One of _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D._ are canonical but with some notable alterations. The title is taken from a translation of Franz Kafka's _The Metamorphosis_. 
> 
> The physical and sexual abuse visited upon Clint is fairly graphically described, and he is raped at one point while unconscious. Clint also suffers mental and emotional torture of the most insidious kind. Phil isn't much better off. This is not a happy story for the majority, but it does have a happy ending, if that makes you feel any better.

Common sense and training dictated that Clint keep his eyes closed even after he regained consciousness.  Stretching his senses, he reached for some understanding of his surroundings.  The last thing he remembered was Natasha clocking him, her fist growing to cartoonish proportions as it neared the point of impact with his face.

He smelled nothing antiseptic, heard no soft-soled footsteps, none of the ubiquitous beeps and murmurs of Medical.

He was in a bed, though, with stiff sheets, the mattress beneath him not especially comfortable, the pillow flattened.

He was restrained, but not by handcuffs or manacles.  No, there was the constant pressure of broad cuffs at wrists and ankles, and he could just make out a broad strap across his middle.

Unable to pick up any more with his eyes closed, Clint opened them cautiously and scanned the room without moving his head, a fruitless endeavor, as from his position on his back, all he could see were white, square ceiling tiles, the kind with tiny, evenly spaced holes.  There was a water stain, faintly hippo-shaped, in the corner of the third to the right of his position.

At last risking a more thorough survey, Clint turned his head and took in his room.  There wasn’t much to discern:  fluorescent light fixture with a wire safety cage ten feet up in the center of the ceiling; white walls devoid of ornament; a metal writing desk with rounded edges bolted to the floor to his right.  A door, one small rectangular window broken into tiny diamonds by the mesh worked into the safety glass.

No handle on the inside of the door.

There was a toilet in the corner behind the door, a sink beside it, white enamel pitted with use.  No mirror.

No windows.

Scuffed green linoleum tile on the floor, clean but faded.  Old facility then, out of date, out of use.

It wasn’t a SHIELD facility, of that Clint was sure.  Those had the aggressive sterility of federal buildings everywhere.

Odds were looking good that Clint had been captured again.  Probably by Hydra.  Again.  He had no idea how he’d come to be in enemy hands, but he wasn’t going to panic until he could gather more intel on his situation.  Besides, someone was probably looking for him.

And as much as it sucked to be in this position, Clint thought it was still better than having some faux-God with a hand up his metaphysical ass.

Shrugging off the shudder even the barest thought of Loki brought out in him, Clint raised his head to try to glimpse movement through the door’s one window.

Nothing.

Testing his bonds, Clint grew alarmed to discover weakness in his muscles of the kind induced either by repeated drugging or prolonged inactivity.  He didn’t like either of those options, but he didn’t have long to worry about it.

The door opened silently— _well-maintained_ , he catalogued—and a tall, spare man with a hawk nose and deep-set brown eyes entered, reading a chart attached to a clipboard before giving Clint a distant, professional smile and introducing himself as Dr. al-Rawi.  Barton gave the guy points for verisimilitude.  His name tag said, “Dr. Ahmed al-Rawi, DPM.”

“How are you feeling today, Mr. Barton?”

Clint noted that the “doctor” had failed to use his title, which made him wonder what the game was.  Perhaps his captors hoped to disorient him or make him feel out of his element.

He shrugged as best he could given the restraints and nodded toward his right wrist. 

“I’d feel better out of these.”

Al-Rawi gave a regal nod.  “I’d imagine that is so.  But first, we must determine your state of mind.  Have you had any nightmares that you can recall?”

Clint schooled his face to a dispassionate expression and considered his options here.  Apparently, the enemy was going in for a mindfuck.

Two could play at that game.  He hadn’t spent years as Natasha’s best friend without picking up a trick or two.

“Why do you ask?” he countered.

The doctor’s glance shuttered.  “As you know, Mr. Barton, you cannot be released from your restraints until we’ve established that you’re no harm to yourself or anyone else.”

So that was the ploy:  Make him think he was in a mental hospital.  He didn’t bother asking which hospital.  He was sure the “doctor’s” story would seem plausible.

“I’m not feeling particularly aggressive,” he answered, offering his most innocuous smile, the one Phil called his “sucker punch smile.” 

 _Because you’re so busy focusing on the smile,_ he could hear Phil explaining to Natasha, _you never see the hit coming_.

Remembering Phil, his voice warm in Clint’s memory, made something in his gut twist, and he suppressed a sound that surprised its way up his throat, pretending to clear it instead, willing away the sudden tightness in his chest.

“Do you remember why you’re here, Mr. Barton?”

“Does it have something to do with New York?” he hazarded.  The events surrounding his attack on the Helicarrier were crystal clear in his memory, but everything after Natasha’s punch was a blank.  Still, he thought they’d been on their way to New York City when the whole thing had gone down.

The doctor made a noncommittal motion with the hand holding the pen.

“Why don’t you tell me what you can remember of New York, Mr. Barton?”

Clint almost laughed.  If the guy was trying to get information out of him about what had happened in New York, he was shit out of luck, given the state of Clint’s memory.

“I think you’ve given me one too many mickeys for me to be of any help to you there, doc.  Ease up on the meds a little and maybe I can help you.”

The doctor’s expression turned grave.  “As we’ve discussed several times now, Mr. Barton, the medications are for your own good.  You will not get better without them.”

The doctor’s kindness, his exasperated but obviously genuine impatience, gave Clint a chill.

“Can you tell me who you are, Mr. Barton?”

“Agent Clint Barton, Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, Five-five-Charlie-Alpha-One-Niner-Niner,” he offered in the monotone he’d been taught for enduring interrogation.

Al-Rawi’s lips thinned and a tightness gathered around his eyes.

“That’s incorrect, Mr. Barton.  Try again.”

Clint repeated the same information in the same clipped tone but at a higher volume, making a point.  Though his eyes would appear to be affixed to a point on the ceiling, in his periphery he could clearly see the doctor’s face.  He catalogued the man’s expressions.  Doctor al-Rawi was not satisfied at all with Clint’s answer.

“At this rate, you will never be well enough to leave your room and visit with the other patients,” he noted, something slightly sad and a little bitter in his voice.

Clint shrugged and smirked, “I like my privacy.”

“Well then, you shall have it,” he answered, turning toward the window and rapping sharply on the glass.  “Right after you’ve used the facilities and taken your medicine,” he added, stepping aside to let two burly interns in white into the room.

Clint felt his heart-rate ratchet up at the sight of the two goons, whose biceps strained the material of their nondescript shirts and whose eyes had the dead flatness of henchmen the world over.

He couldn’t discern anything from their ethnicity—one appeared to be Hispanic, the other a dusty blonde who could’ve been from Minsk or Minnesota.  They didn’t say a word as one put a massive hand on his chest while the other began to remove his restraints.

Clint had already decided that this was as good a time as any to test the skill of his captors, and despite the lethargic heaviness of his muscles, he bided his time until he’d been unbound and ungently propped on his feet before lashing out, head-butting Blondie before kicking the Hispanic orderly behind his right knee.

He ventured toward the door, shoving Dr. al-Rawi into it, and got two staggering steps into the hallway before he felt a meaty hand wrap around the collar of his hospital gown and yank him up short.

His shout of protest was cut off by a sharp jab in his exposed left ass cheek, and then the world around him began to swim sickeningly.

The last thing he recalled was wondering if anyone were going to keep the floor from smacking him in the nose on the way down.

  
*****

  
He woke up some time later—what felt like days but couldn’t have been, judging from the throbbing pain in his nose—with a mouth as dry as Phil’s sense of humor and an urgent need to urinate.

While he ordinarily wouldn’t have given his captors the satisfaction of asking for anything from them, he didn’t fancy the indignity—not to mention discomfort—of lying in his own urine.

When he shouted, the noise didn’t bounce or travel but deadened against the thick walls.  He searched the window for signs of life, and finding none, he called out again, “Hey!  Hey, anybody out there!”

A shadow preceded the appearance of a face at the window, and then the Hispanic intern opened the door and walked in, followed by the blonde guy.

Clint decided he’d called them Larry and Curly, if only privately, and tried out his best smile, the one he typically used on nurses with needles.

“I’d like to use the facilities, if I could,” he asked.

Larry smirked and shrugged, turning as if to leave, but Curly said, “Sure,” in what might have been an accent or could’ve been the cotton in Clint’s ears.  He wasn’t entirely clear-headed, still feeling the effects of whatever horse tranquilizer they’d darted him with.

There was a look in Curly’s eyes that Clint didn’t particularly care for, the sort of expression that suggested he might have something in mind besides helping Clint to the toilet.

Larry snorted and limped toward the door, closing it and putting his back to it before making an he’s all yours gesture with one beefy paw.

Clint laughed nervously and shook his head.  “You know what, on second thought, I’m good.  I’ll just…hold it.”

But Curly was already undoing the restraints.  Close up, Clint could see bruising under his eyes and smell his sour breath.  He stifled a shiver when Curly’s hand lingered on the bare skin of his ankle as he undid the last restraint, but there was no ignoring it when Curly cupped Clint’s naked ass under the gown and propelled him toward the urinal.

“Let me hold it for you,” he said, a sneering solicitude in his voice.

Clint swallowed and said, “Hey, no, but thanks.  I got it.”

“I insist,” Curly growled, wrapping one hand around Clint’s nape and snugging himself up tight against Clint’s back.  There’d be no more head-butting, obviously.

He tried to think about pleasant things, tried to summon innocuous memories as Curly used his free hand to pull up the front of his gown and then wrapped his hand around Clint’s cock and aimed it at the toilet.

“Go,” he ordered, his breath hot and damp on Clint’s cheek.  This time he couldn’t prevent the shudder, and Curly’s nasty laugh reverberated through Clint’s chest.  “Go,” he said again, stubble rasping along Clint’s temple.

Closing his eyes and swallowing heavily, Clint strove to relax his bladder and piss so that he could escape any further fondling.

Eventually, he released a stream of urine into the bowl, resisting the relieved sigh that threatened to leave him, and then reached toward the handle to flush.

Curly’s hand tightening around his cock stopped him in mid-motion.

“No,” he said simply before loosening his hold and then shaking the last few drops of urine from Clint.  He let the gown drop then and stepped back a little, as if to let Clint move.

It was a feint. 

Even as Clint shifted his weight to sidle out from between the orderly and the toilet, Curly squeezed Clint’s nape brutally and drove a knee between Clint’s thighs.  Clint was weak and hadn’t expected the move and dropped to his knees hard, the impact jarring up his spine and snapping his teeth together.

He reached out with his hands to stop his face from colliding with the porcelain edge of the toilet bowl, but Curly was having none of it.  Inexorably, with the advantage of strength and leverage, he shoved Clint’s face toward the urine in the bowl.

Clint struggled, flailing with his hands and trying to find purchase against the slick, cold surface, but he was outmaneuvered and couldn’t stop what was about to happen to him.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, holding it as his head was plunged into the toilet.  Curly held him there until Clint was sure he meant to drown him, until Clint’s lungs burned and the screaming panic forced his lips apart in a useless attempt to breathe.

He sucked in a mouthful of his own urine, eyes opening reflexively.  They stung and burned as he was wrenched at last from the water and flung, gasping and retching, onto the floor at Curly’s feet.

From his position by the door, Larry laughed.  “Nice ass, sweet-cheeks,” he noted, then to Curly, “You should get somma that.”

“Nah, Doctor Raghead’s due for rounds in a few minutes.”  Then he booted Clint in the kidneys and said, “Get up, pretty.   Now that you’ve learned what happens to patients who act like assholes, maybe you’ll behave yourself next time we come to visit.”

If the tone of his voice hadn’t been enough, the leer he was wearing when Clint finally cleared his eyes enough to make it out turned Clint’s guts to water.

He had to get out of there.

  
*****

  
“I have to get out of here,” Phil was saying—trying to say—to the lovely woman with the flower in her hair.  It was his newest attempt to derail the dream that woke him in a cold sweat that wasn’t typically associated with the sunny beaches of Tahiti.

Her smile didn’t change, though her whole image blurred and re-solidified in a split second, as if there’d been a loop in the recording of her.

“I have to get out of here,” he tried again.  “I have work to do.”

She only lavished his shoulders with an alien touch he didn’t welcome, and his lips stretched into a smile he was coming to fear as much as hate.

Phil forced his eyes open and held his panting breath just to hear over it the soothing sound of the Bus’ big engines carrying them thirty thousand feet over the earth.  He took a series of breaths to control his heartrate—he knew he was fine, knew it, but he didn’t feel fine, and his heart worried him, it seemed to him a fragile thing—and then catalogued the new sensations he’d gleaned from the dream before they could slip away.

There’d been a faint greenish tint to the water at the shoreline, and he didn’t think that had been there before.

And the woman’s image skipping, that was new.

As he often did, Phil found his thoughts straying to Clytie, the cellist.  Better than most, he knew that to let a wound heal you needed to leave it alone, but he couldn’t help it.  She’d been such a balm to his soul; he missed the way she’d always known just what he needed to hear.

Her full name was Clytemnestra.  Her parents hadn’t been cruel, they’d been Greek.  She’d been raised with a traveling caravan of musicians and street performers who’d moved from town to town around the islands, plying their trade and picking up strays, she’d once told him.

It hadn’t been a conventional life, this itinerancy, but it had given her a centered calm that Phil had always admired.

Clytie had been his best friend, and he missed her.  He understood why she’d been sold a lie, even appreciated that lie sometimes, when a mission went south or things got tense on a global scale.

He’d seen firsthand what loving a man who put himself often in harm’s way did to Pepper Potts, and Clytie was a lot like her, he thought—strong and fierce and independent, but also loyal to a fault and impossible to deceive.

Phil spent another moment or two on the memory of the woman he’d love, but even in the safety of painful but precious memories, Phil felt a creeping discomfort.  He couldn’t put his finger on what bothered him.  When he remembered her eyes, multi-hued and changeable; the deftness of her hand on her bow; her heat and scent all around him.

Something twinged behind his eyes, and Phil shifted to sit up, reaching for the bedside glass of water he kept there and wiping a hand over his tired face.

Sighing, he put his feet over the edge of the bed and slid into his slippers.  He’d try catching up on the after-action reports; translating Skye’s colloquialisms into SHIELD-approved language could take hours all on its own, and he needed the distance routine always gave him.

  
*****

  
Clint had learned in the days since the Great Swirly Incident that Curly’s real name was Derrick and Larry’s Carlos.

He’d learned that the shots he’d been getting also came in pill form—the little round pink ones were anti-psychotics and the tiny green triangles were supposed to keep him placid. 

He’d learned that tucking them under his tongue didn’t fool anyone, a lesson purchased at the price of having to get up close and personal with Derrick again.

He’d learned that there were three shifts, all of them big, ugly, and mean, and that night was distinguished from day by the light going out overhead.

And he’d learned that he was in St. Joseph’s Secure Mental Health Facility because he’d killed Phil Coulson.

Three days after his intimate acquaintance with the taste of his own urine, Clint had finally proven docile enough to leave free of restraints for his session with Dr. al-Rawi.  He wasn’t allowed to go to the doctor’s office—that privilege, it was implied, might take weeks or even months to earn—but at least it was an improvement that he could sit up like a capable adult and lean his back against the wall behind his bed.

Dr. al-Rawi brought a folding stool, which he guarded while acting as though he weren’t doing so, lest Clint try to use it as a weapon.  But Clint hadn’t regained any of his physical strength—his knees felt like noodles, his arms weak, muscles rubbery.  Still, there was nothing wrong with his eyesight.

He took everything in.

So when the doc had pulled a photograph from the back of the sheaf of notes on his clipboard, Clint had paid attention.  He’d recognized the hairline, the furrowed brow, and the deep baby blues long before the doctor had said, “Do you want to see a photograph, Clint?  It might help you remember who you are.”

“I know who I am,” he’d said, mildly, really, for how frustrated he was.  He couldn’t get any freedom without playing their game, but he wasn’t going to play their game if it meant giving anything up.

“Do you know who this is?”

He’d nodded and waited.  He did a lot of waiting.  Good thing he was trained in patience.

“Who is it, Mr. Barton?”

“Phil.”

“And who was Phil to you?”

Clint had noted the past tense, just as he’d noted the way al-Rawi was writing something in neat, fluid shorthand on his notes, left to right, left to right.

He’d wondered what there was to write about him.

“Phil’s my boss.”  He’d risked a little of the truth to see what it would get him and was rewarded by a nod of approbation from the doctor.

“That’s right, he was.  And do you remember what happened to him?”

Clint had shaken his head.  “Nothing,” he said, “Nothing happened to him.”  But it hadn’t sounded convincing even to his own ears.  The Helicarrier had been under attack.  Even though the threat of Clint himself had been neutralized, there’d still been an Asgardian asshole to deal with.  Who knows what might have happened to Phil in all of that?

“I think you know better than that, Mr. Barton.  Try to remember.”

Blowing out a frustrated breath, Clint had run a hand through his hair and closed his eyes, centering himself on the memory of the Helicarrier, beginning with the fight with Natasha and moving backwards in slow motion through the whole of the attack.

A few minutes later, he’d shaken his head and opened his eyes.  “Nope.  I got nothing.”  He’d tried for light-hearted, as if it hadn’t mattered to him what had happened to his boss.  To Phil.

It mattered, but he couldn’t let them know it.  They’d use his feelings against him.

 “Phil Coulson is dead, Mr. Barton.  You killed him.  It was that event that precipitated your eventual incarceration here, and it is that event you’re going to have to recall and take responsibility for before any kind of mental healing can begin.”

Clint, who was a master of sitting utterly still for hours at a time, had made himself a rock.  He’d allowed not even the smallest micro-expression to betray what he might be feeling.  He wouldn’t give any of them the satisfaction.

If it was true that Phil was dead, then it was possible that Clint had killed him, if only indirectly.  But if Clint had been responsible for Agent Coulson’s death, he’d be locked in a SHIELD containment facility in the middle of the fucking desert getting his brain refitted after Loki’s mindfuck.  He wouldn’t be exchanging bland lies with the Iraqi Dr. Freud here.

“Sorry, don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dr. al-Rawi had sighed, his face a study in parental disappointment.  “Then I’m afraid our session for today is done, Mr. Barton.  You may remain free of your restraints as long as you promise to take care of your things and not try anything to harm yourself or anyone else.  If you can prove you’re responsible, we’ll even allow you to use safety utensils with your next meal.”

Four days later, as Clint attempted to cut up a truly awful Salisbury steak with the blunt but unbreakable rubber-coated spoon he’d eventually been allowed, he considered that whoever was holding him was playing the long con.  He didn’t know how long he’d been held before he’d had his adventure with Derrick the Dunker, but Clint had kept scrupulous calculations since then, and it had been at least a week.

In addition to being allowed a spoon and solid food, Clint had been rewarded for his good behavior with a glossy eight-by-ten of Phil taped to the wall beside the door, where he could see it when he was sitting up or lying on his bed.

The doc had claimed it was to shake his memory, but all it did was offer Clint the cold comfort of knowing that at one time, at least, a man named Phil Coulson had been his boss, and then his friend, and then his lover.  If he was sure of nothing else about his life before this place, Clint was sure that he’d been surrounded by Phil’s scent, brought to fullness by him, made whole and taken apart in a bed they shared.

That wasn’t a memory they could erase, no matter how much shit they pumped into his system.

And no matter how much crap they made him swallow, Clint would never swallow the lie that Phil was dead.  He couldn’t.  If Phil was dead, who would come for him?

There was Nat, of course, and Clint wasn’t giving up on her, either, but she didn’t have quite the same reach and pull as Phil had…did, as Phil _did_.

He had to remember the present tense.  He couldn’t let al-Rawi get into his head like that.

Phil was alive, working to find Clint and bring him home.  Soon enough, Nat would be coming through the door, guns at the ready, eyes watching every angle, and escort him out through the ubiquitous firefight to the chopper or Quinjet on which Coulson would be waiting.

  
*****

  
Phil was on the Bus, running a simple containment operation in the Gobi.  FitzSimmons were in the lab puttering over some bone or other, something to do with pre-sapiens genetic markers for disease resistance, he thought.

Ward and May were infiltrating a terrorist compound twenty klicks from the camouflaged plane. 

Skye was probably attempting to work around her bracelet.

All was right with the world.

Or at least as right as it got when Phil had a splitting headache and couldn’t focus on the comms chatter (well, “chatter” was relative where May was concerned, but Ward’s muttering was occasionally illuminative).  For the third time in as many minutes he tried rubbing his temple with the hand not actively engaged in calling up satellite topography.  It did nothing but blur his vision and make little supernovas behind his closed eyelids.

Something had triggered the headache, but he wasn’t sure what.  Generally, he wasn’t the sort to get them, concussion-inducing injuries excepted, but lately, they’d grown more regular.  He’d already decided that he was going in for a full physical after this mission wrapped.  He needed to relieve his mind not only about the headaches but also his nightmares and the way he didn’t feel quite himself.

Ruthlessly rooting out an almost reflexive thought of how Clytie used to be able to center him as no one else ever had, Phil focuses on May’s sharp, “Radio silence.”

He clicked the mic three times in the standard pattern and moved to watch their progress on the tracking monitor.  Their dual green dots were strangely hypnotic, and he caught himself surfing the waves of pain in his head to the rhythm of their flickering.  When he heard Ward breaking radio silence—and obviously not for the first time, judging from the edge of alarm and impatience in his voice—he realized he’d actually zoned out.

Agent Phil Coulson never lost focus on an op.

(Leaving aside that one mission to Oslo, which he still maintained was Sitwell’s fault.)

“Say again?”

“We’ve acquired the target.”

He struggled to clear the blurred vision his headache was causing and squinted at the monitor.  No heat signatures within forty yards of their position.

“Take it.”

“Resuming radio silence,” May informed him.  The last word was cut in half by the abrupt interruption of transmission.  He hoped that just meant she was impatient to get the damned piece of Chitauri tech and be done with this cakewalk.

As soon as he thought it, Phil knew he’d doomed them, knowledge borne out by the garbled transmission that came in six minutes later—the only words clear over the explosions being “extraction” and “Shit!”

As stoic as Ward was, that kind of violation of radio protocol was extremely alarming.

Phil hurried to the cockpit, blinking furiously to clear his vision even as he keyed the intercom to tell the rest of them to buckle up.

The adrenaline of flying the Bus, which was several degrees of magnitude beyond what he was comfortable flying, no matter how often May had drilled emergency protocols into them all, cleared the headache, and the extraction—really a rescue, but he didn’t argue semantics—went as well as it can, all things considered.

Ward had dislocated his shoulder, and May had a series of shrapnel pinpricks in the exposed skin of her hands, neck, and face, but they’re both otherwise hale and hearty, and they called it a win, celebrating their victory over Simmons’ goat cheese and portabella pizza.

“Internationally famous,” Fitz was sure to mention, as he always did, just as Skye answered, “Just because it’s flown _over_ all those countries doesn’t mean the people on the ground know about it,” which began the usual argument of what constitutes elitist dining in developed nations versus developing ones.

And then it was time to debrief.

By the time he could hit his rack for a power-nap, the strange headache had been shoved out of his mind by the myriad post-mission details he had to take care of when he woke up and a worrying gleam he’d caught in May’s eye over something Skye had said.

Telling himself he won’t dream if he’s only under an hour—or, at least, if he did, he wouldn’t remember what he dreamed, which amounted to the same thing—Phil willed himself to sleep with the long habit of military training and tried very hard not to think of Clytie as he drifted off to sleep.

He was unsuccessful.

  
*****

  
It had been four weeks since Clint had woken up blurry-eyed and throbbing-headed in “St. Joseph’s” and was introduced to the slowest torture in the world—torture by sincere, patient psychoanalysis.

He knew it had been been four weeks because a week ago, he’d been rewarded with a calendar to hang on the wall next to Phil’s picture.

Inexplicably, the calendar featured pictures of beef cattle in bucolic poses, soaring mountains in the distant backgrounds and miles of grass all around.

After he had gotten over the alarm of discovering that it was September—he was pretty sure it had been summer when he’d been mind-raped by Loki—Clint had spent a bemused period of time admiring “Adelaide,” a sexy Hereford with a doe-eyed calf named “Beaut” and trying to understand the good doctor’s rationale.

He wasn’t going to ask, of course.  That would be too much like “participating in productive discourse,” a goal that he was currently disappointing Dr. al-Rawi by failing to achieve.

He did that a lot.

He disappointed Dr. al-Rawi daily, and nightly he let Derrick get his sadistic pleasure from molesting him in increasingly penetrative and painful ways.

Clint wasn’t sure what Derrick’s game was—beyond the obvious, that is—but if his behavior was supposed to lever Clint into confiding in Dr. al-Rawi so the doctor could be Clint’s savior and put a stop to Derrick’s dastardly behavior…well, Clint wasn’t that desperate.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t taken one for the team before.

He’d never taken so many for the team, it’s true, nor so frequently.

And it was also true that it seemed pretty clear that there _was_ no team, obvious by the whole lack-of-rescue thing.

But he wasn’t going to let the physical injuries, invisible but absolutely apparent to Clint, nor the psychological trauma of repeated abuse tip him over into making a mistake that could cost him—cost Phil, cost everyone at SHIELD.

He’d done enough costing for one lifetime.

Sighing, Clint moved away from the calendar and dropped to the floor for another futile attempt to manage fifty push-ups.  His arms gave out at twenty-three.  Sweaty and with eyes stinging with what weren’t at all tears of frustration and rage, Clint sat up, propped his damp wrists on his bony knees, and contemplated his options.

They were growing alarmingly few.

One of these nights, Derrick was going to get what he’d been working himself up to all along.  The verbal threats to Clint’s health weren’t nearly as difficult to stomach as the homophobic shit that poured out of Derrick’s mouth while he roughly fingered Clint’s hole.  All that self-loathing was aimed directly at Clint, and Clint knew a little something about the odds on a target surviving that kind of lethal focus.

So while he was willing to let Derrick keep at it if it meant not giving something to the doc that Clint could never get back, some advantage he was too muzzy-headed from drugs and sleep deprivation to see on his own, he had to worry about the obvious eventuality, the one that made of Clint a cold corpse, ass bloodied and sporting a terminal ten-fingered necklace.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t fight back.  The old Clint Barton, the one he thought he remembered from before Loki, wouldn’t have allowed such abuse.  Would have fought until he had no breath left.  Would have made them pile on the bad guys until he was incapable of resistance.

But he wasn’t that Clint Barton—that much was clear from his utter failure to manage even fifty push-ups.

And if he wasn’t _that_ Clint Barton, he wasn’t sure how he could get himself out of this mess without resorting to confiding his problem in Dr. al-Rawi.

 _Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, Barton_ , he thought he heard Phil saying.  He remembered when he’d heard it first.  They’d had a rare stretch of days during which nothing blew up and no one tried to take over the world.  They’d been somewhere with wide green fields.  Off in the distance, trees had swayed in a warm afternoon wind.  Phil had been wearing a blue denim shirt, impeccably tailored but casual, open at the throat to expose a curl of the hair that Clint loved running his fingers through.  He’d been smiling at Clint, offering him a beer.  There was a red-checked picnic blanket and even a fucking picnic basket, and as Clint had stretched his hand out to take the sweating bottle, Phil had brought his other hand up to trap Clint’s wrist, turning his palm over and dropping something into it.

Simple band, unassuming but heavy, with the rich, dull gleam of real gold.  For the first time since he was eleven, Clint had let something slip out of his too-clumsy grip, the bottle falling unbroken to the grass at their feet.

“Phil?” he’d breathed, running a finger around the band where it rested heavy in his palm, the weight of potential and promise making his hand shake, and Phil had offered Clint the best threat in the world.

“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, Barton.”

In answer, Clint had closed his hand around the ring and leaned in for a breathless kiss.

He’d have been damned if he would ever let Phil go.

Clint swam up out of the reverie when he sensed a presence behind him.  Time was—time not too long ago, at that—that Clint would never have let someone sneak up on him. (Natasha didn’t count.  She was a super-ninja.  Everyone knew that.)

Now, here he was, huddled on the floor, sweat drying to prickly heat on the back of his neck, hand clutched around an invisible ring, left ring finger empty too, not even a pale indentation where his wedding band had once rested. 

“Clint, are you alright?”

If Clint had had more self-possession in that moment, he might have noticed the doctor’s choice of words, using his first name for the first time.  As it was, he barely registered the question.

Because he’d just remembered something else.  Something impossible.  Something…devastating.

He surged to his feet unsteadily, swaying enough that Dr. al-Rawi actually reached out a hand to help him stay upright.

He’d once walked across a high-tension line between the roofs of two forty-story buildings without so much as a broomstick for balance.  Now, he couldn’t even stand up straight with both feet planted on solid ground.

What he’d seen in his memory was a bloodied hand, brilliant scarlet smear across the gold band, strong, capable hand curled lifeless in the dirt.

He’d have recognized the hand anywhere, knew it down to the fine hairs on that grew on Phil’s fingers.

“What?” he asked out loud, not understanding how it could be that he would remember Phil’s lifeless hand.  The image didn’t match with any mission he could remember.  He knew he’d never seen that image before, not in real life, not even in his worst nightmare.

Dr. al-Rawi gently assisted Clint to the bed, waited until he was steady before moving away to open his portable stool and sit.

“You’ve remembered something,” he observed after a period of waiting silence.  It wasn’t a question.  The doc seemed quite certain.

Clint nodded numbly, struggling mightily to clear the fog in his brain that seemed to have grown twice as dense since it had parted for that brief glimpse of his personal hell.

“This is good, Clint.  You need to let those thoughts and feelings surface.  You need to confront them so that you can move past them.”

But Clint was shaking his head, the litany of denial in his head seeping out from between his lips in a weak, “No, no, no.”

“Clint, tell me what you saw.”

Dr. al-Rawi’s voice was patient, eternally patient, a father overcoming disappointment once again in the hopes of coaxing his son into success.  Clint couldn’t clear his head, couldn’t seem to focus, not even to recapture the earlier, happier memory of the day Phil Coulson had proposed.

“Just…I saw…”  He took a deep, gusting breath, not quite a sob, not really, but the sound of it in the quiet room jarred him into remembering himself.  He was Clint Barton, Agent of SHIELD.  He was Clint Barton, Agent of SHIELD.  He wasn’t going to betray his country or his team, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to betray his husband. 

He closed his mouth.

“Perhaps this will help you,” the doctor said, pulling another photograph from his clipboard and holding it out to Clint.

It was Phil in a blue denim shirt, smiling into the sun, skin a warm brown, throat exposed by the open top buttons, beloved curl of chest hair…

There wasn’t enough of the background to discern where Phil was or what he might be doing, but Clint didn’t need it to know when the picture had been taken.

He shook his head.  “No.  There was no one else there that day.  And I didn’t take any photos—too incriminating if they fell into the wrong hands.”

“Who would use a photo of your employer against you, Clint?  _Why_ would anyone do that?  Think, Clint.  Think about who you are.”

“I’m Clint Barton, Agent of SHIELD.”

“No, you’re Clint Barton, livestock manager for the B&K Ranch in Arquette, Montana.  Phil Coulson was the owner of B&K and by all accounts your friend.  You killed him in cold blood, stabbed him through the back with a branding iron, so hard that you pierced his ribcage in the front.  You did this terrible thing for no motive that anyone could discover.  When they found you with the bloody iron still in your hand, you were standing over Mr. Coulson’s body and raving about people coming to get you, about the government being behind it all.  It was determined that you had had a psychotic break, perhaps in part due to a head trauma you’d suffered when you’d been trampled in a branding pen incident three weeks prior to the murder.  You had to be sedated before they could even cuff you.  You knocked one sheriff’s deputy unconscious and bit a second through his left ear lobe. It’s all here,” he finished, indicating his clipboard.

But Clint wasn’t interested in the fucking clipboard.  He wasn’t interested in Dr. al-Rawi’s version of events.  What he was interested in was the startling revelation that the memory of Phil’s outstretched, lifeless hand was starting to take shape.  Rents in the fog of his brain offered horrifying glimpses at what he’d managed to forget.  He wanted to look away, to not-see, but how could he escape his own mind?

Without conscious thought, Clint launched himself off the bed.  His trajectory was sloppy, his moves telegraphed and slow, but he still managed to plow into Dr. al-Rawi and shove him into the narrow space between the sink and the toilet.

The doctor threw his arms defensively over his head and began shouting for help even as Clint laid into him, pummeling his midriff, catching him hard in the solar plexus so that he doubled over, exposing the back of his neck.  Clint brought his hands together and raised them over his head, intending to bring them down on that fragile knot where Dr. al-Rawi’s dark hair met his nape.

But he didn’t get the chance.  Even as he started to bring the hammer of his joined fists down, someone grabbed him from behind and threw him hard into the back wall of his room.  He bounced, landed wrong, feeling his ankle twist, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Derrick had the hypo out, jabbing him with vicious force high up on his exposed arm.

As his eyelids started to flutter, vision narrowing, he saw Derrick’s fist heading for his face.

His last coherent thought for a long, long time was, “You’ve got nothing on Nat.”

  
*****

   
“Sir?” Ward’s tone was that bland balance you could only learn at the Academy:  Guarded concern mixed with respectful deference.  It was the tone you were supposed to use when a superior lost his shit on a mission.

Phil, who’d been leading the team up the ramp and into the Bus after an otherwise routine mission, closed his eyes for a split second and then gave a nod and stepped aside, giving them the illusion of privacy by putting Lola between them and the rest of the team, who gave them glances as they passed.

May’s was the most inscrutable, Skye’s the least.  All the looks they got suggested that the whole team was aware that there was a Problem with Coulson.  It was definitely the sort of problem that warranted capital letters.

When the team had left and to the background whine of the ramp closing, Ward said, “You called me ‘Clint.’” 

It wasn’t really a question, but it invited an answer.

Phil nodded.  “Yes, I did.”

“Did you mean Agent Barton, sir?”

“That would be likely.”

“Anything I should be aware of, sir?”  Still cautious, but growing solicitous.

Phil took in a long but silent breath and shook his head.  “Like what, Agent Ward?”

The younger agent’s answering shrug wasn’t textbook negotiation, but it was all Ward.

“Look, I know you worked with Barton for a long time, sir.  It’s natural you might…”

It seemed Ward had come to the limit of his comfort zone where emotional revelations were concerned.

Phil did not rush to fill the increasingly awkward silence, and Ward eventually conceded defeat.

“Good talk, sir,” he said before making a strategic retreat.

When he was out of sight, Phil sighed and slumped against Lola’s trunk, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and finger and trying to make sense of his slip-up.

Sure, he’d liked and respected Barton, admired his talents—even, on occasion, appreciated his smartassery.

When Nick had come to Medical to deliver the bad news in person that Clint Barton had died as a result of the forced separation from Loki’s mind control—cerebral hemorrhaging was the official determination—Phil’s first thought hadn’t been of Clint’s suffering but of Natasha’s.

“How is Agent Romanov handling Barton’s death?” he’d asked.  Nick had given him a long look and said, “You need your rest.”

Since he’d been declared dead, Phil had never had a chance to follow up on Natasha’s reaction to Clint’s death, though Fury had eventually made it clear that it hadn’t been Natasha’s blow that had killed Clint.  He’d have died no matter what they’d tried.

“It’s like an Asgardian kill switch,” Fury had said.  Then he’d closed his mouth and the book on Clint Barton.

And Phil had mourned Clint’s death.  Of course he had.  He’d have to have been a hard-hearted bastard not to feel the loss of such a fine person, someone he’d genuinely enjoyed working with.

But Phil had lost good agents before, good friends too, and he’d never let his grief bleed over into his work.

Thinking back over the moment he’d made his mistake on the comms with Ward, Phil tried to find some associative connection to Clint Barton.  Ward had been pulling sniper duty, playing eyes in the sky for the team on the ground—May, preparing to infiltrate the suspected tech den, Fitzsimmons and Skye lurking (badly) until they got the all-clear.

Ward had called in that May was clear to make the incursion.  He’d said, “Looks good, sir.”

That’s all:  A quiet, competent, utterly unremarkable communication of prevailing mission conditions.

Nothing in it that should have led Phil to make the mistake of calling Ward by a dead agent’s name.

A dead agent’s _first_ name.

That detail, more than the situation as a whole, made Phil profoundly uneasy.  He and Agent Barton had never had a first-name-basis kind of relationship, neither in the field nor after hours.

He pondered and then discarded the possibility that he’d been thinking Grant and said Clint.

He and Ward didn’t have a first-name-basis relationship either.

No, Phil admitted, if only to himself, there was a Problem with Coulson.  And he had to find out what it was before it drove him to make another error, a much worse error, the kind that got agents killed.

  
*****

  
When he came to—hours or days later, Clint couldn’t be sure—there was an ache in his ass that left nothing to his imagination about how Derrick had spent Clint’s downtime.  He shivered, swallowing a lump in his throat, feeling more violated for having been raped while he was entirely helpless and vulnerable than he would have, he thought, had he been awake and aware for the whole thing.

Somehow, it was more terrible for not being able to remember it.  Clint listened to his breath shuddering out of him and willed himself to steadiness only with a great deal of trouble.  Then he took in the rest of his condition, forcibly ignoring the throbbing pain in his ass that radiated up to the small of his back and branched out, so it felt as though he had been kicked repeatedly in the kidneys.

He was restrained again at the wrists and ankles and across the chest, and his left eye was obscured by the swollen cheek beneath it.

The pain in his face throbbed in time to his heartbeat, which ratcheted up a notch as he realized that there was someone in the room with him.

“You’ve been making no effort at improvement, Mr. Barton.  I’m afraid I’m going to have to take drastic measures.”

It was on the tip of Clint’s tongue to ask if rape weren’t already pretty drastic, but he remembered just in time that he wasn’t going to tell Dr. al-Rawi about that. 

The doc waited, as if for Clint’s response, but he wasn’t going to give the shrink the satisfaction.  None of this was real, he reminded himself.  He wasn’t in a real hospital.  Dr. al-Rawi wasn’t really a psychiatrist.  Clint hadn’t actually killed his husband.

The pain cleared some of the post-drug haze enough for Clint to think about his situation, a task he could manage even under the disapproving, steady glare of the doctor.  He knew enough about mental institutions to discern that a guy like Derrick might get away with the abuse he was piling on Clint, but he shouldn’t be available 24/7 to deliver that abuse.

As far as Clint had been capable of observing, Derrick was around all of the time.  He’d fondled Clint in the middle of the day, after Dr. al-Rawi had made his regular visit.  He’d forced his fingers into Clint’s anus when the whole place was dark and still, only the wan light from the hallway outside filtering through the narrow window in the door.  He’d been there in the morning to comment on Clint’s pissing technique and in the afternoon to flush his dinner down the toilet, sneering, “Don’t want you getting fat, sweet-cheeks,” and grabbing Clint’s ass hard enough to leave finger-shaped bruises.

So that was one clue that this wasn’t an actual hospital.

And then the doc was fanning a series of photographs out, holding them like oversized playing cards so that Clint could capture some of the details in each of them.

He made a sound, involuntary, a noise he couldn’t have predicted or prevented, at the images of Phil splayed out on grass so green that it would’ve made Adelaide and Beaut up there on the wall low with envy.

Phil was wearing a blue denim shirt, this one with white embroidered detailing over the pocket.  Blood had stained the edges of the detail pink.  In one photograph, the entire foreground of the picture was nothing but violent green grass stained almost black with blood.

Another was familiar enough that it made Clint’s chest ache:  Phil’s left hand, partially curled, his gold wedding band splashed with red.

“I don’t know what those are,” he whispered, mouth dry but eyes wet.  “I have never seen that p-place—.”

“The B&K spread in Arquette, Mr. Barton.  Your place of employment for nearly ten years.”

Clint shook his head, attempting to rally some of his defensive wit.  “I’d remember grass that green.”

The doctor’s face took on the expression he got when Clint said something really interesting, and Clint felt cold fear pool in his belly.

“It’s interesting that you see green grass, Mr. Barton.  What else do you see?”

But Clint already felt like he’d betrayed Phil somehow; he wasn’t saying another word.

“These photos are in black and white, Clint.  Look at them again.”

He didn’t really want to see Phil’s lifeless body, even if Clint was in his mind furiously denying the reality of the photos.  Obviously, if the people who had him could hold him in these conditions indefinitely, then they could also afford the best in photographic manipulation software.  But he had to know—were the pictures in color, like he’d seen them before?

He suppressed another sound when his eyes fell upon the photograph that Dr. al-Rawi must have moved to the top.  It was a head-and-shoulders shot of Phil.  The bottom edge of the photo blurred just where the terrible wound in his chest began.

Phil’s blue, blue eyes were nothing but a darker shade of grey against the paleness of his pupils.  His hair was grey, the grass beneath it almost black, everything in lifeless tones of sorrow and despair.

Clint blinked hard, looked again.  Still black and white.

Though he’d been increasingly frustrated with his physical weakness, his inability to do even three full sets of push-ups, Clint had found some comfort in his eyesight being as sharp as ever. 

Well, it was still _sharp_ he guessed.  But it wasn’t _right_.

“What have you done to me?” he asked before he’d considered the wisdom of engaging his captor.

“Nothing has been done to you, Mr. Barton.  Your brain, struggling with the violence you perpetrated on your employer, is attempting to signal your guilt to you.  You supplied the colors because you were there to see them.  You worked in those green fields.  You stained them with red blood.  You made those blue eyes go cold with death, Mr. Barton.  You must come to terms with your crime if you are ever to have any chance of returning to some degree of normalcy.”

“Why are you doing this?” Clint asked then, surrendering to the onslaught of feelings washing through him—confusion, longing, fear, hope warring with despair and self-confidence with urgent doubt.

“I’m trying to help you, Clint,” Dr. al-Rawi said.  “Won’t you let me?”  He sounded so sincere, and so sincerely concerned for Clint’s well-being, and Clint was so tired—tired of having to dodge questions and groping hands and meaty fists and sharp needles.

So Clint broke and told the doctor about what Derrick had been doing to him.

It didn’t take Dr. al-Rawi long to believe Clint’s story.  After all, once he’d released Clint’s right ankle restraint and loosened the chest strap, Clint had been able to roll far enough on his side to offer actual medical proof.

The doctor had snapped on a glove, parted Clint’s cheeks, and probed the angry circle of his abused hole.  Clint had hissed and tried not to buck away from his intrusive finger.

“You can lie back down now,” he’d said when he was satisfied with his examination.

He didn’t refasten Clint’s ankle, nor did he tighten the chest strap.

“Clint?” he said quietly, apparently waiting until Clint made eye contact with him before he went on, “I’m sorry this has happened to you.  Is this—has this happened before?”

Clint shrugged.  “Depends what you mean by ‘this.’” 

The doctor had the grace to turn his eyes away at Clint’s flat tone.

“I’m very sorry, Clint.  This should never have happened at all.  But you also should have told me it was happening.  I would have helped you.”

Clint gave the doctor what he hoped was a withering stare.  He was so strung out by the post-drug malaise and roller coaster emotions of recent revelations that he didn’t think he’d brought his A-game to the look.  Mostly, he wanted to sleep for a year.

Maybe wake up in a warm bed with Phil beside him.

Or never wake up, if that was the only alternative to his dream.

“I’ll take care of it, Clint.  You won’t have to worry about Derrick hurting you again, I promise.”

And there it was:  Captor’s gambit number one—get the captive to feel like you owe him one.  It’ll make him think he has the advantage.  Clint almost snorted at the obvious ploy.

Then he reconsidered.  If the doc was really as good at deception as he seemed, he’d have to know that this was a bush-league move.

So maybe he wanted Clint to think he was an amateur, to throw Clint off his own game?

Clint’s head swam.  There was too much going on, and he was so fucking tired.  He must have mumbled something to that effect because Dr. al-Rawi said, “Of course.  You’re exhausted, I’m sure.  Get some rest, Clint.  I’ll take care of things with Derrick.  Sleep.”

He patted Clint on the shoulder before releasing Clint’s other bonds, unfastening them from the bed frame, and bundling them under his arm.

“I’ll see you later, if it’s alright?  I don’t want to lose the progress you’ve made with the photographs.”

Clint nodded, numb with fatigue and an overload of stimuli.  He was starting to wonder if maybe there wasn’t something seriously wrong with him.

Maybe he _was_ crazy after all.

  
*****

  
For the thirtieth time that day, Phil considered the SHIELD logo on the cover of the complete physical he’d ordered for himself.

According to the doctors at Medical, there was nothing at all wrong with Phil.

Despite May’s attempt at comforting him about the changes he was experiencing, Phil was still deeply unsettled.  Between the nightmares and the headaches, he couldn’t get much rest, and maybe that was clouding his judgment.

Except.

Except he’d kept the headaches from the doctors at SHIELD, maybe as a sort of control, to see if they’d detect some underlying cause without him having to tell them.

Or maybe because he knew there was something wrong with him, and their failure to report the cause would prove what he had been starting to believe himself:  SHIELD had done something to him. 

Maybe Tahiti wasn’t a magical place; it was a cover story, an implanted memory.

In the most recent spate of bad dreams, the woman with the caramel skin and strong hands had morphed into a blurred and paler version of herself.  The voice of the young man with the drinks had grown deeper, his words distorted, a note of urgency there that hadn’t been before.

Absurdly, Phil’s dreaming mind had chosen to interpret the waiter’s tone to mean that if Phil didn’t drink the magical concoction, he’d remain in wonderland forever, shrinking like Alice until he couldn’t be found.

His waking brain knew it was just his own anxiety about who or what he’d become, but Phil couldn’t shake the growing certainty that he wasn’t _right_ , that there was something off about him.

As usual, his thoughts turned to Clytie, to her smile and the way she’d been a constant, comforting presence at his side.

And as had grown normal, the sharp jab behind his eyes forced his mind away from thoughts of the woman he’d loved.

Phil was a lot of things, but obtuse wasn’t one of them.  He knew the almost Pavlovian Clytie-headache response might be psychosomatic, but he had the distinct impression—a gut feeling—that there was a connection between his memories of “Tahiti” and his memories of his cellist.

 _She’s exquisite with a bow_ , he heard himself saying to someone, but when he focused on that memory, he couldn’t recall the circumstances of the remark.  Still, he pushed it, despite an increased agony, an almost blinding pain, as though someone were poking his eyes out with a needle from the inside of his skull.

A cavernous space that echoed.

A taller and masculine presence at his side.

Stalls of some sort.

And a third presence, someone they were observing.  Short, compact, strong.

_Barton?_

Phil hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud.

“Ward, sir,” came a voice from the door, and Phil’s attention drew back to the present with a painful twang, as of a bow string being loosed in the region of his heart.

Ward’s face was impassive, but there was a shadow of mingled concern and doubt in his eyes that was painful to witness.

“I’m sorry?” Phil tried, schooling his face to mild confusion.

“You called me ‘Barton.’”  Apparently, Ward was done pussy-footing around the Problem with Coulson.

“I wasn’t speaking to you, Agent Ward.”

“No, you were talking to a dead man.”  Ward’s shoulders were stiff, his face impassive, but there was a muscle ticking in his jaw and in his eyes there was genuine worry.

“I’m fine, Agent Ward.  Do you have a reason for being here?”

“You asked me to report on the intel I’d gathered from my contact in the DRC.”

“Of course.”  Phil made a gesture for Ward to have a seat and proceed.

But only half of his mind was on the alarming information Ward was providing him about an Islamist splinter group that had gotten its hand on an unidentified weapon that apparently liquefied people from the inside, simulating the terminal crash of Ebola victims.

“WHO doctors on the scene find no trace of the virus,” Ward finished.

Phil hummed noncommittally, as if he were deep in thought about what the origins of such a weapon might be.  In fact, he was watching the memory of his and Nick’s first conversation about Clint Barton, a few days after Phil had brought him in.  They’d been on the range at SHIELD HQ to test whether or not the hype about the World’s Greatest Marksman was actually true or just circus nonsense, and Phil had caught himself talking like a fanboy, using the same language to describe Clint’s archery skills that he’d have used when a boy to discuss Captain America’s exploits.

Nick had given him a fond, knowing look—or as close to fond as he could manage—the look of a long-time friend.

“Are you asking if you can keep him, Agent Coulson?” Nick had asked, smirking.

“Shut up,” Phil had murmured, but clearly he’d meant _Yes_.

“Sir?” Ward tried, once again wresting Phil’s attention back to the present moment.

“Sorry, Ward, you were saying?”

Ward’s eyes were deeply unhappy, his lips thinned to whiteness at the edges, but he said evenly enough, “I was suggesting that we pitch an intelligence-gathering op to SHIELD.”

Phil nodded.  “Put it together.  I’ll contact AD Hill.”

“Yes, sir.”  Ward rose, moving stiffly toward the door.  Phil relaxed a little, letting his mind move back to that memory of himself and Nick and Barton.  It came without pain, unlike his thoughts of Clytie, and it made him strangely warm inside.

“Sir?”

Phil readjusted his focus.

“You need to get on top of this, sir.  Whatever we can do to help, you know you can count on all of us, right?”

That feeling of warmth shifted from the past association to the present, and Phil’s answering smile, though reserved, was quite real. 

“Thank you, Agent Ward.  That’ll be all.”

Ward nodded, something like relief chasing a little of the tension off of his face, and exited.

With the force of years of discipline, Phil turned his mind away from old memories and called up the most recent General Information File related to the Democratic Republic of Congo.  They had a jungle mission to plan.  His own tangled mental mess would have to wait.

  
*****

  
The week or so after Clint’s conditional surrender to Dr. al-Rawi—conditional in the sense that Clint had allowed his condition to be treated, had given up a small part of his privacy in order to be free of physical violation—were a blur.

His wounds, untreated for a period of hours, had caused a blood infection.  Fever dreams and delirium tremens had wracked him, his teeth chattering hard enough to crack, and he had been tormented with waking nightmares of gods with glowing blue eyes, of giant earth worms floating through the air canyons of Manhattan.

Of Natasha shrieking as she fell from a great height with no one there to catch her.

Of an enormous green monster wreaking havoc and a metal man plummeting from the center of a sky-swallowing rose of orange-red annihilation.

And always, threaded throughout, Phil’s blue eyes, betrayal bleeding to lifeless cold, the spark of fire that made him Phil dying as Clint reached for him, held back by something he couldn’t see.

Sometimes his own hands had been drenched with blood.

At other times, he’d been unmoved by the destruction of everything and everyone he loved, governed instead by a scything cruelty that cut down anything inferior to the thing that inhabited him.

Had he killed Phil while he’d been commanded by Loki, and his mind had somehow erased the awful fact, leaving only Phil’s dead body as evidence of Clint’s crime?

When he’d finally struggled up through the thick, hot water of his drowning dreams, he’d been weak as a kitten, unable to even lift his head for water.  Dr. al-Rawi had tended him with solicitous care, making sure that Clint had plenty of fluids, spoon-feeding him weak broth until he could keep down solid foods and feed himself, reading to him from a book of children’s stories apparently chosen for their innocuous content.

In the additional week it had taken Clint to recover enough to walk to the toilet on his own, Dr. al-Rawi had been a paragon of patient and apparently genuine concern, and Clint’s doubts had been growing about how likely it was that this was the world’s most complex mindfuck.

Who would go to such lengths, spend so much time, just to break Clint?  Surely, he couldn’t have any really vital information to tell.  By his calculations, as nearly as he could determine, he’d been out of action almost six months, not including the time he’d spent as Loki’s meat-puppet.

What was the benefit, then, of slowly undoing him?

If Dr. al-Rawi were an evil genius, a sort of psychiatric Mengele, what was his goal?  Why would anyone bother with Clint Barton to this extent?

It made no logical sense.

And that’s when Clint had started to admit to himself that perhaps he _was_ imagining things.

For one thing, the fever dreams about Iron Man and the Hulk in Manhattan, or a place that looked like Manhattan…that couldn’t be real.  By his own recall, Clint had been knocked unconscious by Natasha on the Helicarrier.  The last thing he remembered was her punch aiming for his face.  Whatever had happened after that, to Nat or Phil or anyone—that was outside his experience.  So why had he seen those images in his nightmares?

The only thing he remained absolutely sure of was Phil.  He knew that Phil was real, knew it in blood and bone and breath.  And the photos that the doctor had provided proved as much.

But he’d begun to wonder why the doctor always insisted that Phil had only been Clint’s boss.  Surely he must have figured out from Clint’s febrile rambling that he and Phil had been lovers.  And if Dr. al-Rawi had been the enemy, wouldn’t he have likely known the actual nature of Clint and Phil’s relationship?

If so, why wouldn’t he use that?  If Clint had actually killed Phil, his husband, wouldn’t that be just the sort of detail a mad head shrink would use to undo Clint?

Yet Dr. al-Rawi had never even hinted that he suspected that Clint and Phil had more than a friendship based on their mutual business.

When Dr. al-Rawi had felt Clint was well again, he’d brought Clint envelopes full of pictures that showed Clint working on a big cattle ranch where there were high, snow-capped mountains and infinite green fields.

Sometimes Phil was in the picture, too, smiling or distracted, working or still, his shoulders strong beneath the simple material of a sweat-stained work shirt or in a Carhartt jacket. 

There were cows—so many, many cows—and water troughs, chutes and de-worming stands.

(Dr. al-Rawi had had to explain the last to Clint, and shouldn’t that have been proof enough that Clint had never been around cattle?  Dr. al-Rawi had said that Clint’s mental defenses were “acute.”)

Clint still hadn’t been convinced into believing he was a rancher.  He remembered growing up in the circus and then on the streets, working as an “independent contractor,” being recruited by Phil for SHIELD, winning Natasha to their side.

He remembered vividly the feel of Phil’s lips on his own that first kiss in the rain in Kiev, when they’d both been frozen to the bone and waiting for the hail of bullets that would mark their mutual end.

He remembered Phil working him open with his tongue and his fingers, pushing inside of him that first time in Caracas, the heat and humidity, the buzzing wonder of being so full and of the trust and love on Phil’s face.

He remembered leaving bruises in the shape of his fingertips on the pale skin of Phil’s hips when he’d held him still and driven into him, chanting his name as Phil heaved and cursed under his pinning weight, angry at the world for what had happened in Nigeria and needing Clint to ground him.

Clint remembered the first time he’d felt the weight of the heavy gold band around his finger, the simple ceremony before some anonymous JP in an upstate New York tourist town, empty except for the locals, frost lacing the courthouse windows and snow muffing the sharp angles of bare tree branches.

And he’d remembered looking down at Phil’s lifeless hand, slipping his husband’s wedding band, tacky with Phil’s drying blood, off of his cold finger and pocketing it, not wanting the SHIELD morgue techs to touch it, not wanting anyone to violate the sanctity of that symbol.  Enough of Phil had been violated; at least this, Clint could protect.

He just couldn’t remember how those circumstances had come about, what had led up to Phil’s death.  But that image of Phil’s body, of his outstretched hand and the ring—that was a memory that Clint was sure now belonged only to him.  He’d had flashes of it before Dr. al-Rawi had ever shown him photos of Phil’s purported murder scene, of the vicious violation of flesh that Clint himself had allegedly perpetrated.

Clint had known Phil was dead before Dr. al-Rawi had introduced the idea to him that Clint was responsible.

Clint didn’t necessarily believe that he’d killed Phil, but he was starting to wonder if the doc wasn’t correct in asserting that perhaps Clint’s brain was protecting him from some awful truth. 

At last, unsure what else he could do, what role he was expected to play in the continuing, absurd drama of his incarceration in the mental hospital, Clint had revealed just enough about himself to give the doc something to go on.

“Good,” Dr. al-Rawi said, his tone warm and approving, even fatherly. “These are good things to share, Clint.”

Then his face had grown serious.

“These delusions of yours, of your work as a circus performer, don’t they strike you as outlandish?  Isn’t it just the sort of fantasy scenario a frightened mind might make up to cover what has really happened to you?  And working for SHIELD…of course your mind attached itself to what was in the news at the time of Phil’s murder.  We couldn’t so much as take a breath without hearing about the Battle of New York, the Avengers, and SHIELD’s protection of the planet.  It’s natural that your brain’s defenses would construct an alternate reality out of such pervasive material.  You’re a smart man, Clint, I’ve always seen that about you.  _Think_.”

“I’ll prove it to you,” Clint blurted, feeling stung by the way the doctor had so quickly transformed his approval into yet more admonition.  He was tired of feeling like a failure for not knowing his own mind.

“How can you do that, Clint?”

Clint’s answer had brought them here.

Clint’s feet were cold, and his heart was beating rapidly, shuddering hard enough in his chest that he was sure it was visible through his cotton hospital gown.

He’d been given pants—baggy, shapeless, worn to softness, probably some doctor’s cast-off scrubs—but the thin-soled slippers (no sharp edges, nothing to unravel) did little to protect his feet from the cold concrete under them.

They were in the basement of the hospital, in a long, obviously disused corridor with only dim emergency strips and red exit signs to light their way.

They’d come through a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only,” a door now guarded by another stone-faced, wide-shouldered intern, this one named “Mark,” who had the benefit of not seeming to care if Clint lived or died.

That was fine with Clint.

Beside him, Dr. al-Rawi was holding a hard plastic case that might have housed a musical instrument, except that Clint knew what it really protected, which was why his heart was pounding.

It was a bow.

The doc was going to let Clint prove who he really was, a marksman, an expert archer.

“I have your word that you will not attempt to shoot me?”

They’d established the conditions of Clint’s little field test over the course of the three previous days, so his answer was by rote.

“I have three arrows.  I get one at a time.  I aim at the target and shoot.  If I move my aim so much as an inch in your direction, Mark zaps me with the tazer.”

Dr. al-Rawi nodded and bent over to set down and open the bow case.

It was a hunter’s bow of the middle price range, for a hobby hunter, not a competitive marksman, but it had clean lines and a reasonable pull, and Clint knew he could shoot a simple target at a hundred yards with a child’s bow and a Nerf arrow, so he wasn’t concerned with its quality.

The bow’s grip was smooth under his sure hands, the string sharp and hard.  His fingers had calluses of a hundred thousand draws, so even with the months without practice, there was no real discomfort.

No, this was comfortable and right, and surely the doctor must see it in the way Clint’s posture shifted, the way he took up the stance with the ease of long familiarity, the way he couldn’t keep a smile from his face at the feel of drawing the string up close to his cheek.

His eyes blurred a little on the target, and Clint blinked, startled at the sudden sense that he couldn’t quite make out the center.  Well, no matter.  He’d shot in the pitch dark, aiming true.  He’d hit his target when blinded with blood, when seeing double from knockout drugs, when drunk with concussion.

He was the World’s Greatest Marksman, and despite the weakness in his arms and the sudden twinges in the muscles in his shoulders and back, along his torso and even down into his hips, Clint knew he could hit the target.

He loosed the string, heard the satisfying thump of the arrow hitting the door at the far end, and focused his eyes to make out his score.

The arrow was embedded in the left wall of the corridor twenty-five feet or so from the target at the end.

The air gushed from his lungs, cold seizing them, as Clint grasped for the second arrow, nocked, and loosed, convincing himself that he’d overthought that first shot, that he was psyching himself out.

A treacherous part of his mind reminded him that he’d loosed arrows while taking M50 fire, while under mortar attack, while being physically pummeled, while standing on moving objects, while in mid-free-fall.

He loosed the second arrow, eyes keen on the far target, and almost gave a crow of triumph to see it strike the wall just to the right of the doorframe.  Closer.

The third shot meant victory.  All he had to do was hit the target.  It didn’t matter that his aim, historically perfect, was suddenly subpar.  All that mattered was that Clint could get it back, that he could do something others took years to learn but that had been second nature to him since he was a snot-nosed kid running from a bad dream into a worse one.

He took in a long, steadying breath and centered himself, imagining that he was in a sniper’s nest somewhere—maybe Kinshasa or Jakarta or Islamabad—and that he had the perfect prevailing conditions for a shot.

He heard Phil’s voice in his ear telling him he had the all-clear to shoot.

Clint loosed the arrow at the bottom of an exhale, eyes closed but stance open, relaxed.

It was the perfect shot.

But when he opened his eyes, Clint saw that the arrow had struck the ceiling, ricocheted, and snapped in half against the concrete floor.

He shook his head in disbelief. “No, that’s not right,” he said.  He knew.  He _knew_ it was a good shot.

“You’ve done something…something to the hallway.  Or the arrows!  It’s the arrows, right? You’ve got magnets in the ceiling or…or a forcefield.  Lasers.”

Even as he ranted his denial, Clint knew he sounded insane, paranoid, like one of those people on the conspiracy websites who believed that Kennedy had been assassinated by aliens.

“Clint, calm down.  It’s alright.  This is a good thing.  Now you can see that part of your identity is a lie, fabricated to protect your psyche.  You need to accept the evidence of your own eyes.  Go ahead.  Search the hallway.  We’ll wait.”

But an increasingly frantic search of at least a quarter of an hour had proven nothing more to Clint than that there was nothing at all to find.

They hadn’t rigged the archery test: He’d failed it.

Lump growing in his throat, eyes blurring with tears he refused to shed, suddenly overcome with knee-weakening exhaustion, Clint murmured, “Take me back to my room.  Please.”

Dr. al-Rawi’s hand on his shoulder was warm and comforting, and it stayed there all the way back to his room, where Clint laid down on his bed facing the pictures of Phil and focused on the one thing left in his life that he knew without doubt had been real.  
  


*****

  
“This isn’t real,” Phil murmured, his whole body shaking, sweat pouring out of him, heart pounding wildly in his chest, pressure in his skull increasing as he struggled against the images.  “This isn’t real.”

“You know it is, Phil.  In your heart, you know _this_ is reality, and the other things they’ve made you believe are lies.” Raina’s voice was soothing in its matter-of-factness, and Phil caught himself clinging to it and then hating himself for his weakness.

He struggled again against the onslaught of horrifying images, of his skullcap removed, his brain exposed, a robotic spider building a web of deceit in his gray matter.

Swallowing back an urge to vomit, bile bitter on the back of his tongue, Phil breathed through his mouth in gasps, heard himself sobbing like a child, and tried desperately to grab on to something real and true.

Suddenly, he was holding a heavy gold ring in one hand and Clint’s hand in the other.

They were surrounded by green so bright that it almost hurts his eyes.  Clint was squinting in the sun, his trademark shades removed so that he could see into Phil’s eyes.

See the love there and the promise.

And all at once Phil realized the magnitude of the lies he’d been made to live.  Clytie with her bow and her expressive eyes and her calming presence at his side dissolved in the complete and immutable understanding that there had been no cellist.

There had been only Clint.  The laugh-lines around his eyes and mouth.  The calluses on his hands.  The strength in his body and suppleness of his muscles and his softness as he yielded everything to Phil.

His whiskey voice broken on Phil’s name.  The scent of him everywhere.

The fact of him irrefutable.

And suddenly the machine no longer hurt him.  The image of the utter violation of his being could be managed, compartmentalized, put away.  Phil closed his teeth around the desperation he’d been panting in mewling words, looked up to find Skye’s worried eyes fastened to his own.

Phil said, “I want to die,” quite clearly, no longer under the influence of the machine, which Skye had disabled.  He said it because he meant it, because in the same moment he’d rediscovered his husband, Phil had remembered the one memory Fury had allowed him to keep:

Clint was dead.  
  
  
*****

  
Clint and the doc fell into a routine.  Dr. al-Rawi would come by in the morning and take Clint out for a walk.  There were other patients in the hallway, people with the blank faces and empty eyes of endemic and incurable mental illness.  There were nurses in pale pink or blue or yellow and interns like Mark, beefy and vaguely menacing.

He was even introduced to another psychiatrist, Doctor Amanda Levan, who said, “It’s good to see you out and about, Mr. Barton,” as she paused to say hello in the hallway between rounds.

The grounds of the asylum were considerable, stretching in every direction, so that the distant, black wrought iron fence was just a blurry line on the horizon.

There were formal gardens and benches, even a small fish pond and an arboretum, a gazebo and picnic tables.

On one occasion, Clint saw a woman and a little boy visiting with a patient at one of these.

So he really was in a mental hospital, he realized, and though he catalogued the intelligence he’d gathered—guardhouse at the gate, two men; bars on all the windows, even the cellar’s; slate roof, steeply pitched, no gutters—he didn’t make much of an effort to plan an escape.

Clint was starting to believe he belonged there, that he had indeed had some sort of mental breakdown, that he had killed Phil Coulson, his husband-cum-boss, and that he deserved whatever came of that terrible act.

In their walks, they talked about little things, like the weather, favorite foods, hobbies they enjoyed.  In their afternoon sessions, though, Dr. al-Rawi pushed Clint to be honest with himself, to delve into the depths of his corrupted mind and find the truth of who he was and what he’d done.

“We need to discover your motive for killing Mr. Coulson, Clint,” the doctor noted daily.

And at last Clint said, “Phil,” softly, as if afraid that saying the name aloud would make the memory of him, too, disappear.

“What’s that, Clint?”

“He’s Phil to me, Doc.  He’s…we were…” He trailed off, unable to finish, but by the shifting in Dr. al-Rawi’s expression, the suddenly cautious hope Clint saw there, he realized he must have conveyed his meaning just fine.

“You were lovers?”

Clint nodded.  “Married.”

“That’s not possible, not in Montana.”

“In N—,” Clint began, and then he remembered that he didn’t live in New York, had never lived there.  In rural Montana, they’d have been hard-pressed to find a Justice of the Peace who’d have married them, even had it been legal there.

He shook his head, confused.  He remembered their wedding.  Remembered putting the ring on Phil’s finger.  Remembered the weight of his own ring on his left hand.

He said as much to the doctor, who was quiet for a while, considering.

Then he nodded, “It’s quite possible you were together but had to keep it a secret.  Perhaps the pressure of that secret combined with the trauma to your brain when you were injured caused some sort of dissociative psychotic event.”

Clint had no response to the doctor’s speculation.  He still couldn’t remember the accident when he’d been kicked.  Whenever he thought of his last memory before waking in this place, Clint remembered Natasha.

“I don’t remember the accident.”

Dr. al-Rawi leaned forward in his chair.  As a sign of his trust for Clint and his approval of Clint’s progress, he’d taken to using a real metal folding chair, and it squeaked a little whenever the doctor shifted his weight.  It was a sound Clint had come to associate with discomfort, because the doctor’s piqued interest inevitably meant that Clint was going to be forced to confront something he’d rather not think about.

“How would you feel about letting me hypnotize you?  I haven’t suggested it before because I felt that your progress was too tenuous, your real memories too fragile.  But I think you’ve come such a long way, Clint, that hypnotism might help you break down that last barrier and remember who you really are.  Would you let me do that for you, Clint?”

Clint shrugged, eliciting a disapproving look from Dr. al-Rawi.  They’d been working on Clint’s habit of non-verbal responses.  Dr. al-Rawi called them a defense mechanism to prevent Clint from having to commit to his words.

Clint knew it was that and training and a host of other reasons conditioned into him by time and experience.

“Yeah, alright,” he conceded. 

Dr. al-Rawi was gracious enough not to bother telling Clint not to be afraid.  They both knew that whatever Clint might discover while under hypnosis would likely be painful and difficult.

Clint tried to relax, making himself comfortable by moving until his back was to the wall.  He crossed his legs and let his shoulders slump.  He took deep, centering breaths.

He had half expected the doctor to pull out an old-fashioned gold pocket watch, but instead, he simply produced a quarter from his pocket and began walking it over the knuckles of his left hand.

“Watch the quarter, Clint, and listen to my voice.”

Clint hadn’t expected the hypnosis to work, but before he could recall himself, he was gasping up out of a memory, tears wet on his cheeks, and Dr. al-Rawi was leaning toward him saying, “It’s alright, Clint.  You’re safe now.”

And then Clint remembered what he had, well, _remembered_.

The day had been warm for mid-spring, the sun high and yellow in the sky, the grass blinding in its new green coat.  They’d been out in the west pasture, in the branding pens, cutting out the calves from the cows and herding them into the stainless steel chute that funneled them into the pen.

He’d been working the gate that came down behind the calf as it entered the pen, balanced on the middle rails to either side of the opening, straddling space.

There’d been a shout from one of the cowboys who’d been cutting cows, and then Clint had felt the pen itself shake ominously.

He’d steadied himself, releasing the gate lever to drop it and keep the calf that was about to enter from going in.

No sense trapping the poor thing in there until he knew what was going on.

He’d just turned to look over his shoulder when the pen shuddered again, harder, and his right boot slipped from the rail.

He’d fallen into the chute where the lead calf was waiting.  Frightened, it had tried to turn and run, but the space was too narrow, and it back frantically into the calf behind it.  Before Clint could climb back to safety, there was a third powerful jarring of the pen, and the calf nearest him reared up, striking him on the temple.

He’d been trampled underfoot by the panicked animal before anyone could get to him.

He didn’t remember anything at all after that first blow to the head.

“You came to before the EMTs could get to you, and you were alright except for a headache, but they insisted on taking you to Caldwell for a head X-ray.  The hospital diagnosed you with a moderate concussion, kept you overnight for observation, and released you to the custody of Phil Coulson when you were ready to leave the next day.  Witness statements taken after the murder say that you were never really yourself after the head injury.  They noted you were irritable, quick to lose your temper, even physically threatening on one or two occasions.”

Clint swallowed hard to ease the ache in his throat.  He remembered now—remembered feeling helpless against the sudden waves of anger that would rise up in him, remembered barking at Phil and then feeling like shit about it and then feeling angry that he felt guilty.  He’d known it was irrational, his behavior.  He’d felt like someone else was living in his head with him.

There’d been no god riding him, Clint realized, no supernatural force to explain his behavior.  It had just been him, his brain, the trauma of the concussion.  He’d created all the rest of it to make himself feel better for what he’d said and done.

He wasn’t a productive and useful member of an elite team of secret agents tasked with keeping the world safe.

He was a livestock manager from Arquette, Montana, who’d killed the only man he’d ever loved.

  
*****

  
“Need something, Cheese?”

Almost anyone else, when faced with a cold-eyed Coulson holding a hand-cannon developed by Stark Industries and wearing a splatter-proof, two-thousand-dollar suit, would have been intimidated.

But Nick Fury just fixed his one eye on Coulson’s face and quirked the other brow in the way that made his patch shift on the socket.

“At the moment?  A reason not to blow a hole through your remaining eye.”

“What’s this about, Phil?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know.”  Phil’s voice was quiet:  the quiet of an Arctic ice shelf just before it shears away from the sheet and crushes a research trawler.

“Look, I’ll admit, we messed with your memories.  But it was for your own good.”

“My own good?  How is convincing me that my husband never existed for my own good?  Robbing me of the grief I’m entitled to?  Not allowing me to lay him to rest?  How dare you take those things from me?”

“I had no choice, Phil.”

“Bullshit!  Bullshit, Nick, there is always a choice.  _Always_.  You taught me that, remember?  You taught me the day you got that scar.”  Phil was too much of a professional to ever gesture with a loaded gun, but the piercing sharpness of his eyes were enough to make Nick blink.

Something in Nick’s face shifted, a minute tremor, like deep faults sifting open before the quake, and Phil knew with a certainty that robbed him of breath. 

He shook his head.  “No,” he whispered, but he knew denial was useless.

“I’m sorry,” Nick answered, almost as softly.

“You did have a choice, didn’t you?  Clint or me.  And you chose me.  You son of a bitch.”

Phil’s aim never wavered, despite the way the floor beneath his feet felt like it was heaving, like the whole world was carving itself away beneath him.  Soon, he’d plummet into the cold vacuum of space and be swallowed by infinite darkness. 

“The Council wanted a resurrection man only a little more than they wanted a mind-fucked super-assassin.  They were never going to let Barton live.  At least with you, they got the research out of it.”

Phil thought that if he hadn’t trained himself never to be sick on a mission, he’d have vomited on the polished steel of Fury’s ready room.

“So it was preferable to let them experiment on me?  To let them saw open my head and rip out my memories—my _self_ —and leave me like this, a, a puppet?  Pull the strings and watch him dance to their tune.  That’s what you saw, Nick, when you let this be done to me?”

“No!”  Nick was ashen, his one eye anguished.  “No.  I saw my best friend with a hole in his chest that I could stick my arm through.  And I saw a chance to save him. I made the best choice I had.  I could only have one favor, Phil, and you’re it.  I asked for you.”

“I can’t live with that, Nick.”

“But you can.  You have to.”

“No.”  Phil shook his head sadly, lowering the gun in jerky half-inches until it was no longer aimed at Nick.  “This isn’t life.  This is…worse than death.”

“Phil, I—.”

“I want to see him.”

“Who?”

“Clint.  I want his body.  I want to cremate him as he wanted, and I want an urn with his ashes to come home to so that I know where he is.  So that I know no one is—.”  Strong as he was, Phil couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t let himself imagine what they might have done to Clint.

But Nick was already shaking his head, a weak, repetitive motion like he’d forgotten he was doing it.

“I don’t…  I can’t get that for you, Phil.”

“You owe me this, Nick.  You owe me so much more.  Do this for me and I won’t kill you some day when you aren’t expecting it.”

“Natasha is going to do that for you.”  It wasn’t a question, and Phil didn’t waste breath answering.

“Get me Clint’s body.”

“I’ll make inquiries, Phil, but I can’t guarantee—.”

“No excuses, Nick.  Bring me Clint.  Bring him to me.”

  
*****

After his “breakthrough,” which Dr. al-Rawi celebrated by allowing Clint one hour of unsupervised time in the activities room per day, Clint spent a few days trying to understand how he could have been so misled by his own mind. 

Dr. al-Rawi did his best to allay Clint’s fears.

“It’s natural to feel disoriented post-breakthrough, Clint.  You need to be patient with yourself and give yourself permission to feel everything.  It’s expected that you might have trouble sleeping, be plagued by bad dreams, have a loss of appetite and a sense of having no purpose or direction.  Your brain is like a computer that has been reset back to its original operating system settings.  You have to give it a chance to get used to that state again.  Once you have, you’ll find that things get easier.”

To show how much Clint had improved, Dr. al-Rawi reduced his visits to once-daily, but when Clint shyly admitted to missing their walks on the grounds, the doctor agreed to lunch at the picnic tables twice a week. 

“What do I do now?” Clint asked over dry tuna sandwiches one afternoon perhaps two weeks after he’d rediscovered himself.  “Is there going to be a trial?  Should I have a lawyer?”

Dr. al-Rawi shook his head.  “Don’t worry yourself about any of that just yet, Clint.  Such considerations are premature.  It’s important that you don’t rush your recovery.  There are often setbacks in the months following such an event, and I don’t want you to feel like you’re in a hurry.  There’s time.”

Clint wasn’t sure he’d ever get over or move beyond the loss of Phil.  Whatever else might have been treacherous in his memory, he knew that the feeling of Phil in his arms, in their bed, sharing breakfasts and trail rides and trips to town for feed, talking about the news of the day, the price of corn, whether or not they needed a duck pond…

Every conversation was both sweet and terrible, every memory fraught with a profound sense of loss and an awful, crushing guilt. 

Clint had killed Phil, and he couldn’t even remember why.

“You may never remember,” Dr. al-Rawi said a few days after their last picnic lunch together.  “And I think that you should stop trying.  Perhaps you will not like what you find out, and anyway, it doesn’t change what happened to know why, does it?”

Clint resisted the old urge to shrug and said, “No, I guess not.”

  
*****

   
The team was waiting for him at Stark’s ridiculous tower.

Phil had been reluctant to involve the Avengers, but Natasha had convinced him. 

“We’re taking a risk as it is by involving your team.  If we’re caught, the Council will use it as an excuse to take Fury down, and who knows what will happen to SHIELD if the WSC gets their hands on it?  This way, we’ve got access to all of Stark’s toys, and if push comes to shove, the Avengers can claim unilateral status.  Who’s going to argue with America’s superheroes?”

Phil had admired Natasha’s lethally pragmatic approach and admitted that she was probably right.

Then he’d assembled his team and told them in terse, concrete sentences exactly what he believed had happened and what he planned to do about it.

“This isn’t your fight,” he’d finished, having been about to resign his position.

May had interrupted him before Skye could.

“If it’s yours, it’s ours.  When do we start?”

And that had been that.  Even Fitz and Simmons, though visibly nervous, had voiced their support for Coulson’s plan, whatever it might turn out to be.

So they’d left the Bus at the SHIELD landing field and dispersed, as per their last orders from SHIELD, giving them two days downtime, imminent disaster permitting.

And now they were gathered at Stark’s posh digs waiting for Phil to return from SHIELD HQ.

When Phil walked in, his eyes sought Skye immediately.  The whole plan hinged on her hacking skills.  She was sitting cross-legged on an enormous leather couch, computer on her lap, Tony Stark leaning over her shoulder and pointing to something on the screen.  They were talking a mile a minute.  He caught only every third word and understood approximately a third of those.

“I’m going to regret bringing those two together,” he muttered to Ward, who smirked and nodded in response.

Ward was looking more relaxed than he had in a long while, probably because he was in a room full of people who were at least as capable as—and largely more capable than—he himself was of keeping his team safe.

Cap was talking to Simmons, who’d zeroed in on him as soon as she’d walked in the door—something about mutagenesis and muscle development over decades—and Fitz had his head bent over one of Tony’s ubiquitous robots.

May and Bruce seemed content to Zen out at the windows, which gave them a spectacular view of a Manhattan skyline in the process of being reconstructed.

Natasha was over Ward’s shoulder, not quite apart from the others, but not quite a part of them, either.

Business as usual, then.

“We’ve got it,” Skye called, fingers flying on her keyboard.  Stark was still hovering over her, but he gave Coulson a look of admiration, nodding toward the young woman on the couch.

“Kid’s good,” Stark said.  “A few years, a few billion dollars’ worth of tech, and she might be better than me even.”

“She’s already better than you in all the ways that count,” Coulson observed mildly, despite the way his heart was rabbiting against his ribcage.

“Here it is.”

On a holo screen in the center of the room, an image appeared—a map of the United States.

Out of invisible but omnipresent speakers, Fury’s familiar voice rumbled, the menace in it impressive, even for people who were used to confronting terminal danger.

“You assured me that Agent Barton had died in custody.”

There was a rustling then, as if someone on the other end of the call were shuffling papers.  Then the snap and hiss of a cigarette being lit. 

A supremely arrogant, entirely bored voice answered, “What we do or do not do with our subjects is none of your concern, Director Fury.  You surrendered Mr. Barton of your own free will.  And as I recall, you got exactly what you wanted from the bargain.  Unless you wish to rescind your offer?  We’d be more than happy to trade the assassin for the resurrection case.  His is a far more _interesting_ transformation.”

There was a cold superciliousness in the voice that chilled Phil, and it was only with ruthless self-control that he kept a shiver from working its way up his spine.

Instead, it lodged in the small of his back, filling his bowels with piercing shards of icy dread.

“You can’t have Coulson.  And you’d better be careful if Barton’s still alive.  He’s an extraordinarily resourceful agent, capable of far more than he lets on.  And he has powerful friends.”

“Are you threatening me with those costumed clowns?  You don’t think we could discredit them, individually and collectively, in such a manner that they’d never serve a useful purpose again?”

“I think you’re a lot dumber than you look if you believe the American people will let you dismantle the saviors of New York.”

There was an indelicate but wholly eloquent snort from the other end of the line.

“You’re a fool, Fury.  How it’s possible for you to have risen to your position and still maintained that precious idealism… .  Leave this alone, Director, or the Council will take apart everything you value and leave you with nothing but the blame.  Are we clear?”

“This isn’t the last you’ve heard of the Barton situation.”

A dismissive click as the line went dead was the only answer Fury got.

Phil had to swallow twice, hard, before he managed a more or less steady, “Location?”

Skye shook her head, but it was Stark who said, “They’re clever, I’ll give them that.  Not smarter than me, though.  Jarvis?”

“Sir?”

“Did you have any luck with the secondary mission?”

“Yes, sir.  I traced the satellite signal to an IP address routed through a—.”

“I don’t need to see the math, J.”

“Right.  Three point four seconds after Director Fury’s call connected with Councilor Manning, a second call was routed via the same secure satellite.  I was able to intercept it.”

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense, Jarvis.  Let’s hear it.”

“—mophosis has been discontinued.  Dispose of the experiment materials. Preserve the data using the usual encryption protocol and transmit all findings to your project manager at Alpha One.  You have twelve hours.”

“The project is in its most delicate final stage.  We’re within days of proving my theory.  You can’t—.”

“Doctor, you work for us, not the other way ‘round.  Cancel the experiment.  Dispose of the materials.”

“Barton has already been reassigned, but the research is ongoing.  He continues to give us valuable information.  Do you know how much time I’ve devoted to his—.”

“You will do as you are told, Dr. al-Rawi, or we will return you to the stinking hellhole from which we rescued you and let the current government there take apart your brain, quite literally.”

There was a silence broken only by the static of waves being carried over miles of dead space.

“Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Clean up and get out.  You have twelve hours.”

There was a distinct click as the call disengaged.

“Report,” Phil managed, though this time there was no hiding the strain in his voice.  His shoulders felt so rigid that he thought his spine might snap, and he was keeping the adrenaline shivers from growing visible only by clenching his hands until his trim nails dug half-moons into the flesh of his palms.

“Dr. Ahmed al-Rawi, Iraqi, killed in the invasion of Baghdad, March 2003.”

“Apparently not,” Natasha observed. 

“Suspected of human experiments with Saddam’s Imperial Guard.  Specialized in…Oh,” Skye’s voice died as if someone had deflated her.

“Bad shit,” Stark concluded, something grim and entirely un-Stark-like in his voice.

“Where?” Ward barked, for which Phil was infinitely grateful.  At that precise moment, he was having trouble marshaling breath.

“Secure mental health facility outside of Caldwell, Montana.”  Skye’s voice was a little shaky, but she gave Coulson a brave smile, one that he managed to return.

“Let’s go get my husband back,” he said.

“Twelve hour window, people,” May reminded them.  “We have to move fast.”

“I have a jet,” Stark offered.  “And an approved flight plan that shows we’re going to—where again, Jarvis?”

“Muncie, Indiana, sir.  There’s a high school robotics competition that you’ve been meaning to crash.”

“Nerds, hormones, and robots—what more could a man ask for?”  Stark held his hands out as though he’d just bought the world and then slapped them together.  “I’ll suit up and meet you—where, Jarvis?”

“St. Joseph’s Secure Mental Health Facility, sir.  If I may, there’s a field used for the annual county fair less than a half-mile from the hospital.”

“Make that the rendezvous site,” Phil ordered, moving toward the elevator.  He paused at Cap’s side and glanced up at the man.

“Where do you want me, Agent Coulson?”  If he was bothered by Phil having co-opted his team, Steve Rogers didn’t indicate it.

“We’re going in virtually blind except for what intel Skye and Stark can scare up before we hit the ground.  I’ll have a better sense of where I’ll need you once we’ve got more.  That alright?”

Steve nodded gravely.  “Yes, sir.  I’ve gone into worse situations with a lot less intel.  We’re going to get him back, Agent Coulson.  Phil.”

“Thanks, Steve.”

Bruce fell in beside Phil as he moved toward the elevator again.

“I should sit this one out.”

“Of course, Dr. Banner, whatever you think is best.  But if you’d be willing to coordinate with Jarvis on this end?  Clint—Agent Barton—might need medical treatment when we arrive, and I’m not sure—.”

“I’ll work through Tony’s people.”  Bruce’s voice was gentle and comforting, and any other time, Phil would have been grateful.  But he couldn’t afford the softer emotions, not when fear was clutching his windpipe, strangling the breath out of him with every other heartbeat.

What if they weren’t in time to save Clint?

He’d just gotten his husband back, just confirmed what had only been a gut feeling that the WSC hadn’t, in fact, disposed of Clint but had had other plans for him.

The thought of losing Clint so soon after learning he was alive…

Bruce’s hand on Phil’s shoulder was warm even through Phil’s shirt and jacket. 

“Breathe, Agent Coulson.”

Phil gave him a distracted nod of thanks and finally made it into the elevator.  Just before the doors closed, Natasha slinked through. 

“Jarvis, privacy mode,” she said in a clipped, controlled voice.

There was a beep and then the silence between them deepened.

“Did you know?” she asked.  The coldness in her tone indicated the level of her fury, and if Phil hadn’t had something far more important to worry about, he’d have been anxious for his life.

As it was, he looked at Natasha directly and said, “No.  I suspected, but only just before we got confirmation.”

She nodded once, sharply, accepting him at his word.

“Did Fury know?”

The phone call had suggested otherwise, but neither of them were stupid.  Nick Fury was the consummate dissembler.  He may have suspected they were listening in.

“I don’t know.”

“I will find out,” Natasha promised.

“I look forward to it,” Phil answered.

Business as usual, indeed.

The flight to Montana took a glacial age, during which Phil alternated between holding himself rigidly still while they ran through the plan, which they were constructing on the fly based on floor plans and personnel rosters that Skye had hacked from the St. Joseph’s “secure” records database, and stalking to the cockpit, where May’s calming presence at the helm and Cap’s broad-shouldered strength beside her did what it could to ease Phil’s growing anxiety.

They landed in an overgrown field that bore the faint scars of repeated use as a fairground, kicking up dust from a gravel parking lot as the jet touched down.

Less than a minute after they deplaned, Stark joined them, plummeting from the sky like a shard of the sun had broken off and made its fatal plunge.

The sky threatened rain, the air dense with unspent ions, and Cap pondered electrical interference while Jarvis ran probability equations.

“Forty-three people in the building,” Stark intoned, presumably reading the holoscreen inside his shining helmet.

“Twenty-six stationary—probably patients, it seems to be an actual hospital—seventeen others, some isolated—desk duty—some moving—rounds, security.  Two on the gate.  Mmm, they’ve got fifties,” he noted almost absently, as though fifty-caliber machine guns weren’t a big deal.

“One, two, three guards on the grounds, patrolling the perimeter.  No movement in the basement.  Only one person on the third floor—best guess, it’s Barton.”

Everything went according to plan—Iron Man disabling the guns and the men at the gate, Cap rounding up the perimeter guard.  Simmons and Fitz talked their way in the front door with fraudulent but convincing identification.

Jarvis helpfully disabled the security cameras and took the motion detectors off-line so that Skye could slide in a rear window and get to the security office, where the central data processors were stored, Natasha taking care of the guard on the monitors and shoving him unceremoniously into a corner to give Skye maximum room to work.

May went floor to floor, herding personnel into secured rooms and taking care of the orderlies, who proved to be security of their own sort, while Phil made a beeline for the stairwell, made short work of the secure third floor door, and sprinted to the room where the single occupant was being held.

He paused just outside the door, heart pounding, terror and impossible hope warring for control of his pulse.

Then he was through the room’s door.

A tall, dark-haired man was standing in the center of an otherwise empty room holding a clipboard and a pen, apparently interrupted in the process of taking notes.

“Dr. Ahmed al-Rawi, you’re being detained for questioning.”

An arched eyebrow expressed the doctor’s attitude before his urbane voice, lightly accented, said, “And by whose authority do you make this claim?”

“I’m an independent contractor.  My current employer has a burning desire to reacquaint himself with you.  Perhaps you remember Abu Esraa?”

The doctor paled and the pen went lax in his fingers.

“What do you want?”

“The location of SHIELD Agent Clint Barton.”

The doctor shook his head.  “I want immunity from prosecution and asylum in the United States.”

“Done,” Phil said, wearing his blandest bureaucrat’s smile.  Something approaching arrogance took up room once more in the doctor’s face.

“Then I regret to inform you that Agent Clint Barton is dead.”

Phil felt his mask of indifference slipping.  One hand moved without volition to the gun under his left arm.  The other curled into a fist.

The doctor’s eyes took in every nuance.

“But until the very end, he spoke of you with great fondness, Agent Coulson.”

The doctor’s eyes flickered to the wall beside the door.  Phil knew it for a feint, but he couldn’t resist turning his head to look.

On the wall was a calendar showing a polled Hereford.  Beside it, one above the other, were two photographs, both of Phil, both apparently snapped on the day that Phil had proposed to Clint.

An aborted motion on the doctor’s part brought Phil’s laser focus back to him.

“Where is Clint Barton?”

“I told you, he’s—.”

But Phil had arrived at the end of his control, and he had the doctor pinned to the wall at the foot of the bed, one hand clamped tightly about his throat, the other disentangling the doctor’s forgotten pen from his now crabbed fingers.

With lethal, dispassionate intent, Phil uncapped the pricy writing utensil one-handed and shifted his grip until he held it like a carving instrument, moving in on Dr. al-Rawi’s left eye.

“Where is Clint Barton?” Phil asked again, each word clipped and harsh.

“Double-T, Bar M Ranch, sixteen miles east on Route 188,” the doctor croaked.

“Natasha?”

The doctor looked confused about how to answer Phil’s question, but when the woman appeared in the doorway, he grew still under Phil’s still-strangling grip.

“I promised him asylum and immunity,” Phil noted as he let the doctor go and handed the uncapped pen to Natasha.

“To be conferred posthumously, I assume,” she answered, voice bored.

The doctor’s squawk of protest was cut off by Phil closing the sound-proof door behind him.  He was speaking into the comm link, gathering intel on the state of the operation—facility secure, pending Phil’s orders—and rattling off instructions for Iron Man to take May to the jet while he and Cap secured transport for the rest of the team.

He gave May and Stark the location of the ranch to which they were heading and gathered his team on the lawn of the hospital.

Ward made short work of hot-wiring a hospital transport van, and they were soon on the move again.

“When we get to the ranch, I’ll need you to handle any personnel on the ground.  Don’t hurt them unless they have weapons.  They may be civilians.  Skye, can you trace residual radiation from a subcutaneous tracking device?”

“I can,” Tony offered from his comm link.  “Jarvis?”

“Initial data, sir?”

Phil rattled off the unique RFID signature of Clint’s defunct tracker.

“It might be scrubbed,” Tony offered, in a tone so close to apologetic that Phil winced. 

“Try anyway.”

They’d comb every acre of the sprawling 6300 acre spread if they had to, but it would be nice to narrow down the search field.

“Got it,” Tony reported a few minutes later, just as Ward was wheeling into a half-mile driveway that ended in a wide gravel loop before a long, low ranch house built of old growth timber.

Skye whistled.  “You think Hoss and Little Joe are in the barn?”

They rattled over a cattle grate and slid to a stop before said barn, out of which came a big-bellied, red-faced, middle-aged guy with a cell phone in one hand and a hoof-pick in the other.

“Can I help you?” he asked, staring at them like his face couldn’t settle on an expression—mistrust, disgust, or just plain confusion.

“You have a new ranch hand by the name of Clint?”

“Shi-it, are you his parole officers or something?  Government got enough money to waste sending all of you out here instead of just the one?”

“Which one?” Phil asked, breath catching in his throat.

“Guy who came in that—,” the rancher answered, jabbing the hoof-pick in the direction of a late model import.

“Which way did he go?”  Phil’s urgency must have penetrated the rancher’s self-involvement because he straightened his shoulders a little and said, “Pasture W3.”

“Sta—.”

“Got it.”

Overhead, Iron Man’s engines whined as he streaked past them.  The rancher stared at the vanishing vapor trail, mouth open but eyes sharply considering.

“Who the fuck are you people?”

“Sir,” Captain America said then, stepping forward.  “I’m going to have to ask you a few questions.  Is there a place we could talk?”

“Target neutralized,” Tony reported. 

“Have you got Clint?”  Phil’s blood was pounding in his ears hard enough that he thought he might not hear Tony’s response.

“Affirmative.  Should I bring him to you?”

“No!”  Phil didn’t know what Dr. al-Rawi had done to Clint, but he was sure that the trauma of being swept into the sky by Iron Man wouldn’t help.

“No,” he said a little more calmly.  “I’ll come to you.”

In the barn, as he’d suspected he might, he found a saddled horse waiting patiently in the cross-ties.  He led the horse out, mounted with a minimum of effort, and saluted Skye, who was staring at him with smiling wonder, as he passed.

“Ma’am,” he said, tipping an invisible hat.

“Ride ‘em cowboy,” Skye crowed, smirking at Ward’s stunned expression.

“And they call May ‘the Cavalry,’” Fitz said.

“I heard that,” came May’s unamused voice over the comm link, where she was waiting patiently, jet engines already humming, for the next order.

The pasture third to the west of the ranch house was about a mile’s ride, which Phil took at an easy lope.  The horse had a sweet gait and an amiable disposition, and he might have enjoyed the experience if it weren’t for the mingled hope and fear tangling his guts.

When he arrived at the pasture, he saw Iron Man lurking near a stand of cottonwoods and a solitary figure working to unbind a rolled bale of hay about four hundred yards to the west of those same trees.

Phil rode toward the figure, slowing to a walk when he was within a hundred feet.

“Clint Barton?” he called, keeping his voice neutral, his posture unthreatening.

The man straightened, removing a heavy leather work glove to reach up and wipe sweat from his brow beneath a green John Deere cap.

Familiar eyes lit upon Phil’s face, expression morphing from polite acknowledgement to fearful astonishment.

Then Clint’s eyes shuttered and his mouth assumed a thin line.

“You aren’t real,” he informed Phil, putting his glove on and turning back to his work.

“Clint?”

“You’re dead,” Clint informed Phil without looking back at him.  The cutters Clint was using were too dull for the heavy baling wire, and he cursed to himself as he reached into the tool belt slung low on his hips for a whet stone.

If Phil closed his eyes, they could’ve been in Clint’s quarters at SHIELD HQ, Phil watching Clint sharpen his throwing blades or touch up his arrowheads before a mission.

“Clint, do you know who I am?”  Phil asked, keeping his voice pleasantly neutral.  It was a performance fit for the Oscars, he privately thought. 

“A ghost,” muttered Clint, otherwise pretending Phil wasn’t there.

Phil climbed down from the horse and looped the reins over the horse’s neck.  The horse began contentedly cropping the tall grass around it.

He approached Clint slowly, mindful of the wire-cutters in Clint’s hand and the tension in his shoulders that had always betrayed Clint’s strongest feelings.

“I’m not dead, Clint.  Dr. al-Rawi lied to you at the hospital.  I’m not dead.”

“You are,” Clint said, rounding on Phil and brandishing the cutters like he could dissipate Phil’s ghost by waving them.  “You are because I killed you.  I—.”

“You didn’t kill me, Clint.  I’m alive.  See?”  Phil reached out his hand, a hand that shook from emotion and adrenaline, and said, “Touch me.”

Clint hesitated, eyes roving from Phil’s face to the offered hand.

“Clint, touch me,” he murmured, voice going soft and private.

Clint sucked in a startled breath and shook his head, taking a step back, dropping the cutters and turning as though he were about to run away.

Taking a chance, Phil grasped Clint by the shoulder, feeling the lean muscles bunch under his fingers.

Clint came around with a wild swing that Phil easily ducked.

“Clint—,” he started, but before he could say another word, he saw Clint’s eyes widen, saw them focus on Clint’s own hand, which had come up to grapple with Phil’s reaching arm.

“You—you’re _real_.”

“Yes, Clint, I am.  I’m real.  I’m here.  I came for you, Clint.  I came to take you home.”

“But they said you were—.  And I remembered—.  I _killed_ you.”

Clint shook his head, a look of anguish and guilt on his face so profound that it drew a short, pained sound from Phil.

At the sound, Clint looked up to capture Phil’s eyes.

“Phil?” he whispered.

Phil nodded, throat too full to speak.

“Who am I?” Clint asked, knees giving way even as Phil surged into the space between them to grab Clint and hold him, hold him up, hold him forever.

  
*****

  
Common sense and training dictated that Clint keep his eyes closed even after he regained consciousness.  Stretching his senses, he reached for some understanding of his surroundings.  He smelled something sharp and antiseptic, heard soft-soled footsteps and the ubiquitous beeps and murmurs of a hospital.

He was in a bed with clean sheets, the mattress beneath him ergonomically designed, the back of the mattress raised to give him clear sightlines.

There were no restraints, save the drag of an IV line in the back of his left hand.

Unable to pick up any more with his eyes closed, Clint opened them cautiously and scanned the room.  He hadn’t swiveled his head more than an inch before he heard, “Hey,” and took in the tired smile of Phil Coulson, who was sitting at his bedside between Clint and the door.

“Hey,” he tried, clearing his throat and gratefully accepting the water Phil offered.

They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, and then Phil asked, as he always did, “How are you feeling?”

“More and more like myself,” Clint answered, providing the expected response.

It was Clint’s fourth surgery in as many months, but Tony Stark’s private army of doctors seemed confident that they’d finally reversed the last of the procedures that had robbed Clint of his strength, sense of aim, and equilibrium, effectively unmooring him from those physical and mental pilings upon which identity was founded and casting him adrift to be led into far, dark waters by Dr. al-Rawi.

The records that Skye had liberated from St. Joseph’s secret computer archives had proved enormously helpful in determining what had been done to Clint to begin with, and Tony Stark’s unflagging support, financial and otherwise, had been invaluable.  Bruce Banner and Jemma Simmons had undertaken research, Cap and May had stood guard and run interference with interested government agencies, Fitz had developed intricate nano-tools for the delicate neurosurgery required to give Clint back to himself.

Natasha had insinuated her secret way into the heart of the WSC to gather intel and bide her time until Phil and Clint were ready to spring the trap.

And Phil…

“Did you even go home?” Clint asked, taking in the dark circles under his husband’s eyes and the tension at the corners of his mouth.

“I’m fine, Clint.  I wanted to be here when you woke up.”

“You haven’t done anything but take care of me since…”  It was still difficult for Clint to talk about the “lost months,” as they’d taken to calling the time Clint had been presumed dead.

“I can take care of myself, you know.”  It wasn’t a question, and Phil nodded.

“I know.  I want to be here.”

Clint shrugged, pleased that he could do so without hesitation—al-Rawi had conditioned even that out of him.  He’d had to relearn so much.  “Suit yourself.  But you don’t get any of my green Jell-o.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Phil assured Clint, smiling wider.

“If this doesn’t work,” Clint started, trying to ease into what he’d been considering for the long days and weeks between surgeries.

“It’s going to work.”

“But if it doesn’t…I’ll be okay.  I can find work.  I’m—,” and here, Clint couldn’t resist a bitter snort, “Apparently really good with livestock.”

Phil wrapped a warm, strong hand around Clint’s, being careful of the IV line.  “It’s going to work, Clint.  But if it doesn’t, we’ll figure it out.  You’re not alone.”

Clint nodded, squeezing Phil’s hand and turning to glance out the window to his right.  When he turned back, there was a grave look in his eyes that pinned Phil to his seat.

“How are you doing?”

Phil’s recovery from the effects of what had been done to him by SHIELD doctors wasn’t as clear-cut or smooth as Clint’s.  While Clint’s physiological changes were detectable and to a degree correctable, what had been done to Phil couldn’t be undone without killing him.

“I’m…struggling,” Phil admitted in a quiet voice matching Clint’s for gravity.  “Some days are better than others.  The worst is not knowing…”

He paused, not wanting to voice that particular thought.

“If who you are is who you really were?” Clint asked, and there was a wry note in the question that Phil couldn’t help but smile at.  If there were anyone in the world capable of understanding Phil’s feelings, it was Clint.

“I think May was right,” Clint continued.  The upside to spending hours upon hours in hospital rooms was having had the time to catch up on the months that Clint had missed.  “I think dying changes you, regardless of the circumstances of your return.  And we both died in our own ways, so we’re both different than we were.  The best we can do is build something new together instead of trying to figure out which parts are new and which are old.”

Phil stood up suddenly, leaning over the bedrail to take Clint’s mouth in a long, firm, deep, wet kiss.  When he pulled away, they were both a little breathless.

“I’m interrupting,” Fury said from the doorway by way of greeting.

Phil stood up and turned to face Nick but didn’t let go of Clint’s hand.

“I think you mean ‘interfering,’” Clint replied.

Fury held both hands up, palm outwards, in the universal sign of surrender.  “I’m not here to cause trouble.  I just wanted to see how Clint was doing.”

“Dandy,” Clint answered, giving the Director a shark’s smile, all teeth and lethal intent.

“What do you really want?” Phil asked.

“I wondered if I could talk to you about the way you’ve been allocating your team’s resources.  There’s some concern from higher up that—.”

“Bullshit.”

Phil’s succinct interruption seemed to throw Fury.

“Excuse me?”  He tried a threatening tone, which only elicited a snort from Clint.

“The WSC has no idea that Clint’s alive or that I’m aware of what’s been done to me, and they certainly haven’t the faintest notion of what my team is up to.  In fact, I think if you check the WSC’s latest Request for Information Report, you’ll find that they believe we’re in Madagascar, investigating the causes of the so-called “plague” outbreak.  Next,” Phil continued, tone bland, eyes giving nothing away, “We’ll be in Sochi, for obvious reasons.”

“We’re going to crash the opening wearing nothing but rainbow thongs,” Clint added.

“Well, I’ll have a tie, too,” Phil corrected.

“Right, of course,” Clint concurred.

Fury shifted minutely, a tell no one but Phil might have noticed.  Fury wasn’t used to being on the wrong foot, and he wasn’t sure how to recover his balance.

“How does it feel to be lied to so thoroughly and effectively?” Phil asked, still blandly, though his eyes had taken on a cold, cutting expression that sliced through Fury’s façade.

“Get used to it,” Clint said, voice as cold as Phil’s expression.

“Look, I think there’s been a misunderstanding about all of this.  We need to—.”

“You,” Tony Stark interrupted from the doorway, “Need to get your ass out of my hospital before my security throws you out.”

It was Fury’s turn to snort derisively, a schoolyard sound that had always translated to _You and what army?_

Steve appeared over Tony’s shoulder.  He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt stretched tight across his broad shoulders.  Embroidered over the pocket were the words “Stark Security.”

“Sir,” Steve said, politely but with an edge that suggested he was fast arriving at the end of his patience.

Nick turned to Phil, appealing, “Phil, c’mon.  Is this really how you want to play it?”

“I think there’s been far too much playing here already, don’t you?  Our lives aren’t a game, a fact you don’t seem to have fully grasped.  I can’t speak for the rest of my team, but Clint and I have already written our resignations.  Two, actually.  The one you can live with, which exculpates you in the violation of my rights and in the surrender of a US citizen to a foreign national for torture, and the one you can’t live with, containing specific details of your egregious culpability in said crimes.  Which will it be?”

“Blackmail, Cheese?  I didn’t think you had it in you.”  He was going for bravado, but there was a false note in it that they all heard.  Quietly, Tony and Steve moved a few yards down the hall to give them the illusion of privacy.

“There are a lot of things I might have in me now that I didn’t before, but I wouldn’t know, now would I?”

Nick flinched at the icy anger in Phil’s voice.

“Phil, you have to know that they aren’t going to let you go.”

“ _They_ will soon have their own problems to deal with.  Look, I suggest you quit while you’re ahead.  Shortly, the World Security Council will no longer have any authority to make decisions for this planet.  When that happens, SHIELD will be all that stands between the world and some pretty deep shit, and you’ll be the head shit-shoveller.”

“And what happens to the Avengers?” 

“Stark and his team might be willing to throw in as independent contractors—I’ll be representing them in any and all such negotiations—but they don’t answer to you anymore.  You accept that gracefully and come out looking fine, or you attempt to undermine our intentions and go the way of the WSC.  Your choice.”

“That’s not really a choice, Phil.”

“For a guy with one eye, you’re pretty fucking blind,” Clint said. 

Fury nodded, his mouth an unhappy line, and turned to go.  Over his shoulder as he reached the door, he said, “Take care of yourself, Cheese.”

Phil said nothing.  His silence seemed to settle like a weight on Fury’s shoulders, and he appeared somehow smaller as he walked away.

“You think he’ll listen?” Clint asked when Fury was good and gone.

“Doesn’t matter.  We hold all the cards that count.  Let him see what it’s like to have his life played like a game for a change.”

“So when can I get out of here?”

“Two days if you don’t show signs of infection, and if you can—.”

“Pee on my own and keep down solid foods.  Yeah, yeah.”

“In the meantime,” Phil said, lowering his voice and moving closer.  “I could check your reflexes, see how they’re coming along.”

“What’d you have in mind?” Clint asked, voice husky, eyes alight.

Phil showed him.

*****

 **  
Epilogue**.

Phil didn’t say, “Take your time, Clint.”  Clint knew he had all the time he needed. 

He didn’t say, “It’ll be alright,” because he wasn’t in the habit of lying to the people he loved.

Instead, he sat on the red-and-white checked blanket in the bright green field and watched as Clint handled his bow and considered the target, attached to stacked hay bales three hundred yards away.

He could see Clint going through a mental checklist.

Visual acuity.  Check.

Muscular strength.  Check.

Steadiness of nerves.  Check.

Breathing.  Check.

Clint took his stance, as breathtaking now as the first time Phil had seen it all those years ago at the SHIELD range, and nocked the arrow, but before he drew, Clint shook his head, replaced the arrow in its quiver and set the bow down on the portable table they’d brought for that purpose, and walked over to where Phil was sprawled on the blanket.

Wordlessly, he slipped the gold band off his left ring finger and held it out to Phil.

Phil took it, the weight reassuring, metal warm with Clint’s body heat, and smiled, unashamed of the tears pricking at the corners of his eyes.

Phil couldn’t see Clint’s eyes behind his sunglasses, but he knew what expression he wore.

Then Clint resumed his firing stance, nocked the arrow, drew, and loosed.

The arrow struck the target at the far end of the field with a satisfying thwap!

Phil gazed down the firing line to see that Clint had struck the target dead center.

Without pause, Clint nocked and drew, loosing arrow after arrow, which fired into the target, decimating the first arrow by striking it repeatedly.

Phil felt the tears start down his cheek but didn’t bother to wipe them away.  He could see the wetness glinting on Clint’s own, see the way his hand shook as he clenched it for a fist-pump of triumph.

“Honey,” Clint called after a suitable period of getting his shit together.  “I’m home.”

Yes.  Yes, they were.


End file.
